Te Aka Māori Dictionary

Te Murumāra Foundation

About this app

Te Aka is a Māori language dictionary that is easy to use by searching for Māori or English words. It includes the ability to filter search results, and to save definitions to a Favourites list. There are currently over 24,000 Māori headword entries in the database, which is being added to over time. An offline dictionary has also been included when internet connectivity is not available.

As well as English meanings, it has example sentences with translations for many entries. It even has photographs and audio clips for Aotearoa/New Zealand native fauna and photographs of flora, important people and other items where a photograph will aid understanding.

In addition to the words one would expect in a traditional dictionary, it also has encyclopaedic entries designed to provide key information about plants, animals, stars, planets, heavenly bodies, important Māori people, key ancestors of traditional narratives, tribal groups, ancestral canoes, song types, musical instruments, Māori names for institutions, country names, place names and other proper names. There are also detailed explanations of key concepts central to Māori culture. Comprehensive explanations for grammatical items are included, with examples of usage, as are idioms and colloquialisms with their meanings and examples.

The Te Aka Maori app is the companion to the popular www.maoridictionary.co.nz website and forms part of the Te Whanake Māori Language learning series.

Ratings and reviews

Great to have an app version of te aka! Largely good, but I have noticed that if offline some words will not be available. I got frustrated when reading a novel and thinking that the author used several words that don't exist, but later (with wifi) they had definitions. If this is to make offline searches faster, please include the option to have the ENTIRE database offline, not a subset of it. I'd rate it 5 stars if that issue is resolved.

It's getting very frustrating to use. I'm studying and needing to learn a lot of words and phrases. But it doesn't even comprehend some simple things. I could find kupu and hou but as soon as I had them together it said it had no information. I feel frustrated as I thought paying for the app would give me more info and support, I feel I should have just stuck to asking Google instead. Also I would like to be able to translate from English to māori but I can't seem to do that either.

I love this app but the recent update has disabled the offline search function that I paid for in the previous version of the app! I found the offline function incredibly useful. I think it would be very useful to include "o" and "a" category information for different nouns, as it is very important to know this in order to use them correctly in sentences.

What’s new

General maintenance release