Hale means strong and healthy, especially in old age. Hale and hearty, still hale, a hale old man.
It survives almost entirely in the pair hale and hearty, which is used of somebody older than you might expect to be so well. On its own it sounds literary. There is a separate verb hale meaning to drag, which survives in haul and in hale before a court. Note that hale and whole and heal and health are all the same Old English word for undamaged, taking four different routes.
1adjectivehaleStrong and healthy, especially in old age.
“Her grandfather is still hale and walks to the village every morning.”
hale is a quality of robust health.
HALE → HAIL, and they sound the same
At eighty he still walks to the shop through the hail with no coat on, and comes back up the hill whistling.
hooks ontohail
Northern Middle English hale is a variant of hole, from Old English hal, whole or healthy. Whole, heal, health and hallow all come from it, and hale is the northern form that stayed.
Proto-Germanic
*hailaz — whole; entire; healthy
Proto-West Germanic
*hail
Old English
hāl
enm-nor
hal
English, today
hale
From enm-nor hal, hale, variants of hole (“healthy; safe; whole”), from Old English hāl, from Proto-West Germanic hail, from Proto-Germanic hailaz (“whole; entire; healthy”). See whole for more.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire