Word Type
Hella can be an adjective, an interjection, a contraction or an adverb.
hella used as an adjective:
- Intensifier, signifies an abundance of a thing; much or many.
"There are hella people here." - a lot; or, a hell of a lot.
"We paid hella for that Chinese cuisine."
Adjectives are are describing words. An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or pronoun (examples: small, scary, silly). Adjectives make the meaning of a noun more precise. Learn more →
hella used as an interjection:
- For sure; totally; hell yeah; used as a strong affirmation of something that was just said, accomplished, or revealed.
""We definitely rocked that shit man!" "Hella!""
An interjection is an abrupt remark like Oh! or Dear me, or Eww. It is usually used to express the strong emotions of the speaker. The sentence 'Congratulations! You won the gold medal!' shows the use of 'congratulations' as an interjection. Learn more →
hella used as a contraction:
- Hell have.
"Where the hella you been?"
A contraction is a word made from two words merged together. For example, "can't" is a common contraction for "can not"; "let's" is a contraction of "let us"; and "where'd" is a contraction of "where did". Contractions are used to replace commonly occuring word pairs so that speaking and writing is more efficient. Learn more →
hella used as an adverb:
- Intensifier (modifies verbs); to a large extent; totally; very much.
"I can't tell you how much I hella love the new track." - Intensifier (modifies adjectives); to a large degree; extremely; exceedingly.
"I guess she seems hella stoned in her commercial."
An adverb is a word that modifies an adjective (very red), verb (quietly running), or another adverb (very carefully). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is hella?
- Adjective usage: There are hella people here.
- Adjective usage: We paid hella for that Chinese cuisine.
- Interjection usage: "We definitely rocked that shit man!" "Hella!"
- Contraction usage: Where the hella you been?
- Adverb usage: I can't tell you how much I hella love the new track.
- Adverb usage: Jane was driving away, and the door was open, so I hella ran for it.
- Adverb usage: Oh, today's Cyrell's bday. We hella sang her happy birthday at the spot.
- Adverb usage: I guess she seems hella stoned in her commercial.
- Adverb usage: I've been a Star Wars fan since I was hella young.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of hella are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of hella, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
