What does ala mean in Hawaiian?
Ala is a path or road, and also a fragrance — two senses that sit side by side in the same short word.
The road sense gives the great names: Alanui, the big road, and the ala loa, the long trail that ran around each island.
The fragrance sense gives ʻalaʻala and the many names about scent. Hawaiian treats a smell as something that travels a path toward you, which is probably how one word came to hold both.
Say it AH-lah. Every vowel is pronounced, and the capitalized syllable takes the stress. The pronunciation guide covers the rules.
On this site ala is part of 4 names: 1 begin with it, 2 end with it, and 1 carry it elsewhere. They split evenly between girls and boys, and all of them sit in the group of Hawaiian names meaning earth.