What does Kamehameha mean in Hawaiian?
Kamehameha is a Hawaiian boy name that means the lonely one, the one set apart. The name comes from ka (the) + mehameha (lonely, solitary). It is pronounced kah-meh-hah-MEH-hah, with 5 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Kamehameha I united the Hawaiian Islands in 1810.
Kamehameha belongs with other Hawaiian names about royalty and warrior.
Kamehameha I
The name belongs first to Kamehameha I, the chief from Hawaiʻi Island who brought the islands under a single rule by 1810 and founded the Hawaiian Kingdom. Four more kings took the name after him, and it is carried today by Kamehameha Schools, founded under the will of his great-granddaughter Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
Because of that weight, Kamehameha is not an ordinary given-name choice. It is used, but it is understood in Hawaiʻi the way a European family might understand naming a child after a founding monarch.
The words inside Kamehameha
mehameha means lonely, solitary.
How to pronounce Kamehameha
Say every vowel. The vowels in Kamehameha are a as in “father”, e as in “bet”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Kamehameha a boy or girl name?
Kamehameha is used mainly as a boy's name, though Hawaiian itself has no grammatical gender.
How often Kamehameha is given in the U.S.
No year from 1880 to 2023 saw five or more U.S. babies named Kamehameha, and it never reaches five in the Hawaiʻi records either, so it is rare as a first name.
How well recorded is Kamehameha?
Kamehameha has its own entry among Wiktionary’s documented Hawaiian given names.