Samuel Hoyt Elbert (8 August 1907 – 14 May 1997) was an American linguist who made major contributions to Hawaiian and Polynesian lexicography and ethnography.

There he met researchers on Pacific languages and cultures at the Bishop Museum, chief among them Mary Kawena Pukui, from whom he learned Hawaiian and with whom he worked closely over a span of forty years.

When war broke out in the Pacific, the U.S. Navy employed him as an intelligence officer studying the languages of strategically important islands.

He was hired by the University of Hawaiʻi in 1949, and taught classes in Hawaiian language and linguistics until he retired in 1972, introducing new teaching methods and new levels of rigor into Hawaiian language classes, which until then had a reputation for being easy.

He spent a year in Denmark on a Fulbright scholarship in 1964–64 collaborating with Monberg on a monograph on the oral traditions of Rennell and Bellona.