What does ʻahu mean in Hawaiian?
ʻAhu is a cloak or covering. The famous ones are the ʻahu ʻula, the feathered cloaks of the chiefs, made from hundreds of thousands of tiny feathers knotted onto netting.
Those cloaks were among the most valuable objects in the Pacific, and the labour in one represented years of work by many people. The word carries that sense of something both protective and enormously prized.
Kaʻahumanu, the favourite wife of Kamehameha I, is 'the feather cloak'.
Say it AH-hoo. Every vowel is pronounced, and the capitalized syllable takes the stress. The ʻokina (ʻ) is a short catch in the voice, like the break in “uh-oh”. The pronunciation guide covers the rules.
On this site ʻahu is part of 2 names: 0 begin with it, 1 end with it, and 1 carry it elsewhere. Most are girl names, and all of them sit in the group of Hawaiian names meaning royalty.