It was adapted from the English alphabet in the early 19th century by American missionaries to print a bible in the Hawaiian language.

In 1822, a writing system based on one similar to the new New Zealand Grammar was developed and printed by American Protestant missionary Elisha Loomis.

[2][3] Due to words with different meanings being spelled alike, a separate letter to represent the glottal stop became desirable.

As early as 1823, the missionaries made limited use of the apostrophe to represent the glottal stop, but they did not make it a letter of the alphabet.

The names of M, N, P, and possibly L were most likely derived from Greek, and that for W from the deleted letter V. with lower offglide Kaona = town similar to ew in few