hell

UK/hɛl/US/hɛl/

adverbB22 meanings One of the most common words in English · #98 of 15,258mostly spoken

Other forms: hells

Hell is the place of punishment after death, in Christian teaching and in a great deal of art and literature built on it. That is the plain meaning, and it is the smaller half of how the word is used.

The rest of the time it is there to sharpen a sentence. What the hell was that, how the hell should I know, a hell of a day — the word adds heat rather than meaning. Go to hell is a dismissal. All of it is informal and some of it is rude, so it is worth recognising long before it is worth using.

Definitions of hell

1adverbexclaimDropped in after the question word, or before the thing being described, to sharpen it and show irritation or disbelief.B2~8%
“What the hell was that noise?”
2nounhellA place of punishment after death.A2~92%
“The painting shows the damned being led into hell.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Phrases it lives in

a hell of a — used to say something is very big, very good or very bad
go to hell — a rude way of dismissing somebody

Where it comes from

Middle English
helle
English, today
hell

From Middle English helle. From Middle English hel, hell, helle, hælle, from Old English hel, hell, from Proto-West Germanic hallju, from Proto-Germanic haljō (“hell, netherworld”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱel- (“to cover”). c. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Belief & Ritual

Practise this word

hell in the wild

Many projects that enter development hell are gradually abandoned by the involved parties and are never produced.
Development hell
Such places are sometimes equated with the English word hell, though a more correct translation would be "underworld" or "world of the dead".
Hell
Another term used for the concept of hell in earlier writings is niraya (Pali and Sanskrit).
Naraka (Buddhism)
The Narakas of Buddhism are closely related to Diyu, the hell in Chinese mythology.
Naraka (Buddhism)
In Islam, Jahannam is the place of punishment for evildoers in the Akhirah / afterlife, or hell.
Jahannam

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

Definitions of hell

1adverbexclaimDropped in after the question word, or before the thing being described, to sharpen it and show irritation or disbelief.B2~8%

“What the hell was that noise?”

2nounhellA place of punishment after death.A2~92%

“The painting shows the damned being led into hell.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.