What does Kapuna mean in Hawaiian?
Kapuna is a Hawaiian boy name that means the spring. The name comes from ka (the) + puna (spring). It is pronounced kah-POO-nah, with 3 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Kapuna belongs with other Hawaiian names about water.
Why sources disagree about Kapuna
Look Kapuna up in three places and you will get two answers. Here is each reading and where it comes from.
- “the spring, the water source”
- “a misspelling of kupuna”
Which one to use. If you arrived here after hearing the word for an elder, the word you want is kupuna, not kapuna. Kapuna with an a is a different thing: ka puna, the spring.
Kapuna or kupuna?
These are two different words and the single vowel is doing all the work. Kupuna means a grandparent, an elder, an ancestor, or anyone of that generation, and it is used constantly in Hawaiʻi — in schools, in government, in everyday speech. The plural is kūpuna, with the first vowel held longer.
Kapuna reads instead as ka puna, the spring or water source. Ka-puna is recorded as a place name in Pukui, Elbert and Mookini's Place Names of Hawaiʻi. It is a legitimate Hawaiian reading, just not the word most people are looking for.
The words inside Kapuna
puna means spring of water.
How to pronounce Kapuna
Say every vowel. The vowels in Kapuna are a as in “father”, u as “oo”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Kapuna a boy or girl name?
Kapuna is used mainly as a boy's name, though Hawaiian itself has no grammatical gender.
How often Kapuna is given in the U.S.
No year from 1880 to 2023 saw five or more U.S. babies named Kapuna, and it never reaches five in the Hawaiʻi records either, so it is rare as a first name.
How well recorded is Kapuna?
Kapuna is built from vocabulary recorded in Pukui–Elbert, the standard Hawaiian dictionary, but it has no entry among documented Hawaiian given names.