Hale

How to spell hale

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hale

What does hale mean?

1. adjectiveStrong, vigorous, and free from illness, especially in older age.

Hale in a sentence

• At ninety he remained hale and hearty, still tending his garden each morning.

• The doctor pronounced her hale after a full recovery from the operation.

Where does hale come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English hāl, meaning 'whole, sound, or healthy', which is also the direct ancestor of the modern word 'whole' (the silent 'w' was added to that spelling only later). The root traces back to a Germanic source shared with German 'heil' and is closely tied to a whole family of wellbeing words: 'health', 'heal', and even the greeting 'hail' all spring from the same idea of being sound and intact. In northern dialects the form 'hale' survived to mean physically robust, while the same word further south softened into 'whole'. By the medieval period 'hale' was firmly attached to the sense of vigorous good health, the meaning preserved today chiefly in the set phrase 'hale and hearty'. There is also a separate, now mostly archaic verb 'hale', meaning to drag or haul someone forcibly; it entered Middle English from Old French 'haler' and is the older sibling of the everyday word 'haul'.

How the word is built

• hale (from Old English hāl: whole, sound, healthy)

Words that sound like hale

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

• hail: Pellets of frozen rain that fall from storm clouds.