Right now I’m finally feeling motivated to learn the constructed language Toki Pona.

My current motivation is that I want to understand the memes on the Toki Pona subreddit, so as a form of note taking I have decided to construct a personal dictionary at the bottom of this page. It’s based on this much better Toki Pona dictionary and this cheat sheet.

This page is still pretty short, because Toki Pona only contains about 140 words(!).

In the spirit of Toki Pona, I do my utter best to define every Toki Pona word with only a single English word, but as you’ll see it isn’t always possible.

Notably, I’ve shortened kokosila (a reference to Esperanto’s krokodili, meaning “crocodile”) from “not speaking toki pona in a toki pona environment” to “betrayal” in my dictionary.

The English words with parentheses around them are ones I wasn’t able to find a satisfying, short description for yet that doesn’t rely on grammatical words like “interjection” or “particle”.

Because I have zero knowledge of Toki Pona at the time of writing this sentence, it’s a pretty bad idea to use this personal dictionary of mine to learn Toki Pona for yourself. Instead, I recommend you construct your own Toki Pona dictionary, which you can customize to contain the exact amount of detail you personally prefer.

As most of the words have several possible meanings, where the right meaning has to be gathered from the surrounding context, I’ll be updating the definitions as I figure out which meanings are more common in practice.

a - (emphasis)
akesi - reptile
ala - nothing
alasa - hunt
ale - all
ali - all
anpa - lower
ante - difference
anu - or
awen - keep
e - (put before object)
en - and
epiku - epic
esun - trade
ijo - thing
ike - evil
ilo - tool
insa - inside
jaki - yucky
jan - person
jasima - opposite
jelo - yellow
jo - has
kala - fish
kalama - noise
kama - coming
kasi - plant
ken - can
kepeken - use
kijetesantakalu - raccoon
kili - fruit
kin - very
kipisi - cut
kiwen - hard
ko - semi-solid
kokosila - betrayal
kon - air
ku - 2nd toki pona book
kule - color
kulupu - club
kute - hear
la - if
lanpan - take
lape - sleep
laso - blue/green
lawa - head
leko - square
len - clothing
lete - cold
li - is
lili - small
linja - string
lipu - flat
loje - red
lon - real
luka - hand
lukin - look
lupa - door
ma - earth
mama - parent
mani - money
meli - woman
meso - average
mi - me
mije - man
misikeke - medicine
moku - food
moli - death
monsi - back
monsuta - monster
mu - animal sound
mun - moon
musi - amusing
mute - many
n - hm
namako - additional
nanpa - number
nasa - weird
nasin - path
nena - hill
ni - this
nimi - name
noka - foot
o - hey
oko - eye
olin - love
ona - they
open - start
pakala - fucked
pali - work
palisa - stick
pan - bread
pana - give
pi - of
pilin - feel
pimeja - black
pini - finished
pipi - bug
poka - side
poki - box
pona - good
pu - 1st toki pona book
sama - same
seli - heat
selo - outer
seme - what?
sewi - sky
sijelo - body
sike - circle
sin - new
sina - you
sinpin - face
sitelen - write
soko - mushroom
sona - know
soweli - animal
suli - big
suno - sun
supa - horizontal
suwi - sweet
tan - from
taso - only
tawa - move
telo - water
tenpo - time
toki - speech
tomo - home
tonsi - transgender
tu - two
unpa - sex
uta - mouth
utala - fight
walo - white
wan - one
waso - bird
wawa - strong
weka - remove
wile - want