What does haole mean in Hawaiian?
Haole means foreign, or a foreigner. The Hawaiian Dictionary of Pukui and Elbert gives it first as a white person, an American or an Englishman, and adds that it formerly meant any foreigner, and that as an adjective it means foreign or introduced, as with plants and animals brought from elsewhere. In everyday Hawaiʻi English today it almost always means a white person, the answer to "what do Hawaiians call white people".
The word is older than contact with Europeans. Hawaiian uses it in compounds that have nothing to do with skin colour, such as haole pākē for a Chinese foreigner, and the core sense of foreign or from elsewhere is what those uses share. The shift to meaning white people specifically came with the arrival of Americans and Europeans in large numbers in the 1800s.
A popular story says haole comes from hā (breath) and ʻole (without), because foreigners did not share breath in the traditional greeting. Linguists reject it. Breath is hā, with a long vowel, and without is ʻole, with an ʻokina, and neither sound is in haole. Albert J. Schütz, a linguist at the University of Hawaiʻi, has written that as far as anyone knows the word cannot be split into smaller words at all.
Whether haole is an insult depends on how it is said. On its own it is a plain description, used by everyone in Hawaiʻi, including white residents of themselves. Paired with a hostile word or tone it becomes one, the way many neutral words can. It does not appear in Hawaiian given names.
Say it HOW-leh. Every vowel is pronounced, and the capitalized syllable takes the stress. The pronunciation guide covers the rules.