Hail

How to spell hail

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hail

What does hail mean?

1. nounPellets of frozen rain that fall from storm clouds.
2. verbTo call out to someone or something in order to attract attention or summon it.
3. verbTo come from or be a native of a particular place.

Hail in a sentence

• noun

  The hail dented the roof of every parked car on the street.

• verb

  She stepped to the kerb to hail a passing taxi in the rain.

• verb

  The new managers both hail from the same coastal town.

• noun

  A sudden burst of hail shredded the tomato plants in the garden.

• verb

  The lookout tried to hail the approaching ship with a flag.

• verb

  Many of the recipes hail from her grandmother's village.

Where does hail come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This single spelling actually carries two histories that happen to have collided. The weather sense comes from the Old English hagol, a native Germanic word for the small balls of ice that fall in a storm, and it is closely related to the Dutch hagel and German Hagel meaning the same thing. The greeting and summoning sense, by contrast, came into English from the Old Norse heill, meaning 'whole', 'healthy', or 'lucky', which was used in toasts and salutes wishing someone good health. By the medieval period English speakers were calling out 'hail!' to wish a person well, and from that shouted greeting grew the modern idea of hailing a taxi or hailing from a place. That older meaning of 'health' is exactly why hail sounds identical to its homophone hale, meaning sturdy and healthy, since both ultimately trace back to the same notion of wholeness. Keeping the two spellings apart is the main trap: the weather and the calling-out word is hail, while the robustly healthy word is hale.

How the word is built

• hail (from Old English hagol: hailstones); the greeting sense from Old Norse heill: whole, healthy

Words that sound like hail

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• hale: Strong, vigorous, and free from illness, especially in older age.