"MALO ¹, s. Haw., a strip of kapa or cloth tied around the loins of men to hide the sexual organs. Polynesian, ubique, malo, maro, id., ceinture, girdle-cloth, breech-cloth.
Sanskr., mal, mall, to hold; malla, a cup; maltaka, a leaf to wrap up something, a cup; malā-mallaka, a piece of cloth worn over the privities..
Greek, μηρνομαι; Dor., μαρνομαι, to draw up, furl, wind round. No etymon in Liddell and Scott.
MALO ², v. Haw., to dry up, as water in pools or rivers, be dry, as land, in opposition to water, to wither, as vegetables drying up; maloo, id., dry barren.
Ta., maro, dry, not wet; marohi, dry, withered. A later application of this word in a derivative sense is probably the Sam. malo, to be hard, be strong; malosi, strong; the Marqu. mao, firm, solid; N. Zeal., maroke, dry; Rarot., Mang., maro, dry and hard, as land.
Sanskr., mŗi, to die; maru, a desert, a mountain; marut, the deities of wind; marka, a body; markara, a barren woman; mart-ya, a mortar, the earth; mīra, ocean.
For the argument by which A. Pictet connects maru and mira with mŗi, see 'Orig. Ind.Eur', i. 110-111. It is doubtless correct. But in that case 'to die' could hardly have been the primary sense or conception of mŗi. To the early Aryans the desert, the maru, which approached their abodes on the west, must have presented itself primarily under the aspect of 'dry, arid, sterile, barren', a sense still retained in the Polynesian maro. Hence the sense of 'to wither, to die', is a secondary one. Again, those ancient Aryans called the deity of the wind the Marut; and if that word, as it probably does, refers itself to the root or stem mŗi, the primary sense of that word was certainly not 'to die', for the winds are not necessarily 'killing', but they are 'drying', and that is probably the original sense of their name.
Lat., morior, mors, &c.
Sax., mor, Eng., moor, equivalent to the Sanskr. maru." (Fornander)