Aotearoa (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Aotearoa is the most widely known and accepted M ori name for New Zealand. It is used by both M ori and non-M ori, and is becoming increasingly widespread in the bilingual names of national organisations, such as the National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna M tauranga o Aotearoa. The original derivation of Aotearoa is not known for certain. The word can be broken up as: ao = cloud, tea = white and roa = long, and it is therefore usually glossed as "the land of the long white cloud." In some traditional stories, Aotearoa was the name of the canoe of the explorer Kupe, and he named the land after it. Kupe's wife (in some versions, his daughter) was watching the horizon and called "He ao! He ao!" ("a cloud! a cloud!").