moa

Etymology

It is borrowed from Māori moa,^{[2][3][4][5][6]} a word recorded only in New Zealand Māori.^[2] Morris's “Austral English” (1898) describes it as the Māori name of the giant bird scientifically called Dinornis, which passed into popular Australasian and English use for every species of that bird.^[7] The Māori word is thought to come from Proto-Polynesian *moa (“fowl, chicken”);^[2][3][1] the OED compares Rarotongan moa (“chicken, fowl”),^[2] and the American Heritage Dictionary compares Fijian moa (“swamp quail”) and the word moa for the chicken in Samoan, Tongan and Hawaiian.^[3] The OED quotes P. H. Buck (1949), who argued that the first settlers, having brought no fowls with them, gave the spare name to a native bird that promised still better food.^[2]

Earliest recorded meaning

The Māori word is first recorded in 1820, spelled “Móe O’”, in Lee and Kendall's Grammar and Vocabulary of the Language of New Zealand;^[2] Morris quotes it as “Moe, a bird so called”.^[7] The first English use, for any of the extinct flightless birds of New Zealand, is from 1839, in R. Taylor's journal.^[2][4] Etymonline dates the word to 1842,^[8] and Dictionary.com to 1810–20.^[9]

Semantic evolution

Owen's description of Dinornis in 1839 did not yet use the name moa,^[7] which later passed into general use for all the species of the bird.^[7] An obsolete English form “movie” (1842–3) probably arose from confusion with a Māori name of the North Island.^[2] The compound moa bone is recorded from 1875.^[10][11] Moa-hunter was the name given to an early Māori culture marked by the hunting of moas;^[6] New Zealand Oxford now calls it a disfavoured term once used by historians for the earliest settlers, whom some formerly thought not to be Polynesian.^[11] Etymonline says that the birds were hunted to extinction by about 1500.^[8]

Timeline

• 1839 – any of the large extinct flightless birds of New Zealand.^[2][4]
• 1842–3 – the obsolete form “movie”.^[2]
• 1875 – attributive use, as in moa bone.^[10]

Meanings

Noun

1. Any of several large extinct flightless birds of New Zealand, of the order Dinornithiformes, resembling the emu or the ostrich, which ranged from about 1 to 3 metres in height.^{[2][4][5][11][12]}

References

1. ^ a b c Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
4. ^ a b c d Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
5. ^ a b Collins English Dictionary (2023), Glasgow: HarperCollins
6. ^ a b Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d Morris, Edward E. (1898), Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages, London: Macmillan
8. ^ a b Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
9. ^ Dictionary.com Unabridged (2016), based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, New York: Random House
10. ^ a b Simpson, J. A.; Weiner, E. S. C., eds. (1989), The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
11. ^ a b c Deverson, Tony; Kennedy, Graeme, eds. (2005), The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, Auckland: Oxford University Press
12. ^ Moore, Bruce, ed. (2004), The Australian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed., Melbourne: Oxford University Press