Watch this space! This is one of the pages written in the prototype stage of this web site, which has been transferred with minimal changes to the newer format. It is still therefore "under construction", but contains the essential linguistic and botanical information, along with other material. Updated text and more pictures will be added progressively as soon as time permits (new pages for plant names not yet discussed are being given priority). If you would like this page to be updated sooner than planned, please email a note to temaarareo at gmail.com.
 In Hawaii, Tonga and Rarotonga words incorporating derivatives of the root *kisi seem to have been used primarily for the yellow wood sorrel, Oxalis corniculata, illustrated on the left, and in the gallery above. The early settlers of East Polynesia may have brought this plant to places along with them, establishing it in places where it was not native, like Hawai'i and possibly Rarotonga.). Its status in Aotearoa is uncertain (it was first recorded in Northland by the French botanist Achille Richard in 1832). The same words were also extended in various Polynesian languages to include a few other herbs with simlar prostrate form and habits of growth, or similar medicinal properties. The Oxalis species was used medicinally in Tonga, for example in the treatment of convulsions, and in Hawaii as a general tonic, among other things. According to Murdoch Riley, the flowers of this and other Oxalis species were used by Maori in salads (Herbal, p. 479).
Interestingly, although the Oxalis species is possibly found natively in Aotearoa, no Maori name seems to have been recorded for this plant, although related species go under a variety of names, such as tutae kāhu and tutae kākā (hawk dung and parrot dung respectively). It is not impossible that Oxalis corniculata was originally called kihikihi or kōkihi, but the more useful Tetragonia species later gained a monopoly on the name. Alternatively, it may simply not have arrived here before 1769, and have been of no particular importance when it did establish itself. It is easy to see how the Tetragonia, in New Zealand, and Portulaca species in Hawai'i attracted this name, despite the difference in leaf-form; the flowers of the "tick clover" Grona triflora (formerly known as Desmodium triflorum), also called kihikihi in Tonga, are noticeably different from those of the other species with cognate names, but the plants share the clover-like leaves of the Oxalis, and the prostrate, spreading manner of growth.
All the Hawaiian native species of Portulaca -- P. lutea, P. molokinensis, P. scelerocarpa and P. villosa -- share the name 'ihi, along with the introduced P. oleracea.
 The Niuean kihikihi, Phyllanthus virgatus (pictured on the left) is widely a distributed species, found natively in the Indian Subcontinent, East and Southeast Asia, Australia and the Western Pacific, probably also brought into East Polynesia by the first Polynesian explorers, perhaps because of the medicinal qualities of the leaves and fruits, used in treatment of various ailments including earache and meningitis. It grows as a slender prostrate annual or perennial herb or subshrub, with straight branched stems -- in its shrub form it can grow two or three feet high and the stems will become woody. The leaves are evenly distributed alternating along the stems and branches. Separate male and female flowers are borne on the same plant. The leaves fold up at night, giving it the Tahitian name moemoe. It is known as kihikihi only in Niue.
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