What does Kapiʻolani mean in Hawaiian?
Kapiʻolani is a Hawaiian girl name that means arch of heaven. The name comes from ka (the) + piʻo (arch) + lani (heaven). It is pronounced kah-pee-oh-LAH-nee, with 5 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Name of Queen Kapiʻolani, consort of King Kalākaua.
Kapiʻolani belongs with other Hawaiian names about heaven and royalty.
Queen Kapiʻolani, and the chiefess who defied Pele
Two significant women carried this name. Queen Kapiʻolani was the consort of Kalākaua, and founded the maternity home that became Kapiʻolani Medical Center, at a time when Native Hawaiian infant mortality was catastrophic. Her motto was Kūlia i ka nuʻu — strive for the summit.
An earlier Kapiʻolani, a high chiefess and early Christian convert, descended into Halemaʻumaʻu at Kīlauea in 1824, ate the sacred ʻōhelo berries without offering them to Pele, and challenged the goddess to strike her down. The act was reported worldwide and Tennyson wrote a poem about it. It remains a genuinely contested memory in Hawaiʻi.
The name means the arch of heaven.
The words inside Kapiʻolani
piʻo means arch, arched and appears in 3 Hawaiian names, among them Piʻolani, Waipiʻo.
lani means sky, heaven and appears in 53 Hawaiian names, among them Kailani, Kalani, Leilani, Lani.
How to pronounce Kapiʻolani
Say every vowel. The vowels in Kapiʻolani are a as in “father”, i as “ee”, o as in “go”. The ʻokina (ʻ) in Kapiʻolani is a short pause, like the break in “uh-oh”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Kapiʻolani a boy or girl name?
Kapiʻolani is used mainly as a girl's name, though Hawaiian itself has no grammatical gender.
How often Kapiʻolani is given in the U.S.
Social Security records show 17 U.S. babies named Kapiʻolani from 1980 to 2023, all girls, counted as Kapiolani because the records drop the ʻokina and kahakō. It appears in 3 of those 44 years. Its peak was 2014, with 7. The 2014 to 2023 total of 7 is fewer than in all earlier years combined. In the Hawaiʻi records it never reaches five births of one sex in a year, the level at which a name is listed.
How well recorded is Kapiʻolani?
Kapiʻolani has its own entry among Wiktionary’s documented Hawaiian given names.