What does Makena mean in Hawaiian?
Makena is a Hawaiian girl name that means abundance, a beach on Maui. The name comes from mākena (many). It is pronounced mah-KEH-nah, with 3 syllables. The stressed syllable is written in capitals.
Makena belongs with other Hawaiian names about gift and ocean.
The words inside Makena
mākena means abundance.
Makena as a place name
Mākena is also a beach on Maui, where the name is read as abundance. Place names and given names draw on the same words, so the meanings usually overlap but are not always identical. The page on what Mākena means has the full story, and Hawaiian town and beach names covers the rest.
How to pronounce Makena
Say every vowel. The vowels in Makena are a as in “father”, e as in “bet”. See the full Hawaiian pronunciation guide.
Is Makena a boy or girl name?
Makena is used mainly as a girl's name, though Hawaiian itself has no grammatical gender.
How often Makena is given in the U.S.
Social Security records show 6,482 U.S. babies named Makena since 1984, but that spelling is mostly a spelling of McKenna and the Kikuyu name, so the count says little about the Hawaiian name. In Hawaiʻi itself, 153 babies born in the state were named Makena from 1988 to 2021, with a peak of 14 in 2018. 64 were born there from 2012 to 2021.
How well recorded is Makena?
Makena is built from vocabulary recorded in Pukui–Elbert, the standard Hawaiian dictionary, but it has no entry among documented Hawaiian given names.