What does Kaikoa mean in Hawaiian?
Kaikoa is a Hawaiian boy name that means sea warrior. The name comes from kai (sea) + koa (warrior). It is pronounced kye-KOH-ah, with 3 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Kaikoa belongs with other Hawaiian names about ocean and warrior.
Where you'll hear it
Kaikoa is a modern pairing of two of the most-used elements in contemporary Hawaiian naming: kai, the sea, and koa, a warrior — and also the koa tree, whose wood was used for canoes and weapons. Both are common as names in their own right, and the compound reads clearly to any Hawaiian speaker.
It is not a name recorded in the older sources. It belongs to the same recent wave of naming that produced Kaimana and Kekoa, and it is used and understood in Hawaiʻi today rather than being a coinage with no currency.
The words inside Kaikoa
kai means sea, seawater and appears in 12 Hawaiian names, among them Kai, Kailani, Kaimana, ʻAukai.
koa means brave, warrior and appears in 4 Hawaiian names, among them Koa, Kekoa, Nakoa.
How to pronounce Kaikoa
Say every vowel. The vowels in Kaikoa are a as in “father”, i as “ee”, o as in “go”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Kaikoa a boy or girl name?
Kaikoa is listed here as a boy's name. Of the 172 U.S. babies given it, 0% were girls and 100% boys.
How often Kaikoa is given in the U.S.
Social Security records show 172 U.S. babies named Kaikoa from 2003 to 2023, all boys. It appears in 17 of those 21 years. Its peak came in 2022, with 16, and 129 were born from 2014 to 2023. In Hawaiʻi itself, 44 babies born in the state were named Kaikoa from 2006 to 2021, with a peak of 7 in 2021. 39 were born there from 2012 to 2021.
How well recorded is Kaikoa?
Kaikoa is built from vocabulary recorded in Pukui–Elbert, the standard Hawaiian dictionary, but it has no entry among documented Hawaiian given names.