MINE2026-083 - historical text
Hawaiian O-e-o-e wooden toy bullroarer
United States - Hawaiian Islands - Oceania - Polynesia
Play / practical
O-e-o-e English
Source term: bullroarer
O-e-o-e: Hawaiian name recorded by Culin for the wooden toy bullroarer.
Whirled on its cord, this end-pierced wooden blade hummed through the air — a Hawaiian children's toy that informants also called ko-wa-luwa-lu. It belonged to a whole family of island spinning and buzzing playthings recorded in the 1890s: the po-ka-kaa "buzz" of perforated hau bark, the hu-ila-ma-kani wind-wheel of paper or bark cloth, and the hu-o-e-o-e humming tops cut from small gourds. Making sound was the game — each toy a different way to set the air singing.
O-e-o-e: BULLROARER. - This is made of wood, with a hole in one end through which is passed a cord with which it is whirled. It is known to my informants as a toy.
Stewart Culin, 'Hawaiian Games' (1899), p. 220, item 41.
- Object
- End-pierced wooden blade with a whirling cord.
- Function
- Culin's Hawaiian informants knew it as a toy.
- Map confidence
- high - Hawaiian Islands general; placed on Oahu as an on-land archipelago anchor, not a source-named island or play site.
- Source location
- p. 220, item 41
- Toy / secular survival