Other forms: hailed, hails, hailing
Hail is frozen rain — hard little balls of ice that fall from the sky and bounce. A hail storm, hail on the roof, the hail lasted five minutes.
It is uncountable, and a single piece is a hailstone. The verb is impersonal like other weather verbs: it is hailing. Two unrelated senses share the spelling. To hail a taxi is to call it over, and to hail somebody as something is to praise them publicly — hailed as a masterpiece. And hail from means to come originally from a place, which is slightly formal and always about origins.
1nounhailFrozen rain falling as small hard balls of ice.
“Hail stripped every leaf off the beans.”
2verbattractTo call to somebody or something to attract attention.
“She hailed a taxi at the corner.”
3verbpraiseTo praise somebody or something publicly.
“It was hailed as the film of the year.”
4verboriginallyTo come originally from a place.
“The family hails from somewhere near Cork.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
hail is frozen rain, or a call.
The ice word is Old English hægl, from a root meaning a pebble — which is exactly what a hailstone is. The greeting is a separate word from Old Norse heill, meaning healthy or whole, and it is the same root as health, hale and whole. Two words, and only the weather one is native.
Proto-Indo-European
*kagʰlos — pebble
Proto-Germanic
*haglaz
Proto-West Germanic
*hagl
Old English
hæġl
Middle English
hayl
English, today
hail
Built from
From Middle English hayl, haul, from Old English hæġl, hæġel, hagol (“hail”), from Proto-West Germanic hagl, from Proto-Germanic haglaz, of unknown origin. Either from Proto-Indo-European kagʰlos (“pebble”); or alternatively from ḱoḱló-, a reduplication of ḱel- (“cold”). Cognate with stq Hail (“hail”), West Frisian heil (“hail”), Low German Hagel (“hail”), German Hagel (“hail”), Dutch and Swedish hagel (“hail”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Icelandic hagl (“hail”). Compare also Old Norse héla (“frost”). a doublet of haglaz, if the second etymology (“cold”) is correct. Root-cognates outside of Germanic include Ancient Greek κάχληξ (“pebble”), or alternatively Sanskrit शिशिर (“cool, cold”), possibly also Lithuanian šešėlis (“shade, shadow”), depending on the etymology.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA