It means 'living'. Or better - we should rather accept the broader view of the Polyensians and say it means thriving in the 'living water' from Sun. Not until Sun in spring will send his rays down onto earth after the dark winter season will things begin to grow. A necessary sign is movement. Things which do not move are 'dead'. Water moves.

Ora is the same word as ola in Hawaiian. And Mokuola is to be understood as Motu-ora - the 'living' island.

... He became a mighty warrior in those days, and was known throughout all the island, so that when he died, his name, Mokuola, was given to the islet in the bay of Hilo where his bones were buried; by which name it is called even to the present time ...

In the world of myth everything is interconnected with everything else. Mokuola became the name of an islet (motu). Names are important. A complication, though, when reading Hawaiian names is that they have eliminated 't' and are using 'k' instead. But there are words beginning with 'k' in Hawaiian which in other Polynesian dialects also are beginning with 'k'. The Hawaiian dialect is therefore more difficult to understand than the dialects used on other Polynesian islands.

To 'alive and kicking' (= ora) you need food and water. It is the same with the plant kingdom, Sun must shine in the sky and there must be rain, then comes the greenery. Anciently all over the world it seems to have been a common belief that Sun delivered both.

'The rays drink up the little waters of the earth, the shallow pools, making them rise, and then descend again in rain.' Then, leaving aside the question of water, he summed up his argument: 'To draw up and then return what one had drawn - that is the life of the world.' (Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli.)

They were not stupid those ancestors of modern man. From the time when fire became a household necessity it was known that water will boil if a fire was put below a water container. Hot steam would follow the sparks of flame and rise up towards the sky (the abode of Sun, Moon, and the rest of the 'stars'). When the steam was cooling it turned into water again and fell downwards like all other water.

Sun is like a great fire up in the sky and he makes the shallow pools warm. He will draw some of it upwards, otherwise from where would the rain come?