Hell

How to spell hell

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce hell

What does hell mean?

1. nounIn many religions, the place of punishment or suffering for the dead; more loosely, any situation of great misery.

Hell in a sentence

• The long commute through roadworks felt like hell every morning.

• Medieval paintings often depicted hell as a place of fire and torment.

Where does hell come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes straight from Old English hel or helle, the name for the abode of the dead, and it survives almost unchanged into modern spelling. Its deeper root is the Proto-Germanic haljo, meaning 'the concealed place' or 'that which is hidden', built on an even older root that meant 'to cover' or 'to hide'. The same covering idea sits behind ordinary words like 'hull' (the covering of a seed) and 'hole', and behind the figure of Hel, the underworld and its goddess in Norse mythology. As Christianity spread through Anglo-Saxon England, the existing native word for the hidden land of the dead was simply reused to translate the Latin and Greek notions of a place of punishment, which is how it took on its familiar moral sense. Because the word is short, native, and phonetically regular, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years.

How the word is built

• hell (from Old English hel/helle, the concealed underworld; a single Germanic root, no affixes)