It’s Hella Cool: Investigating the Properties of Hella

Authors

Lydia Lee, Yale UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-21-2025

Volume

7

Issue

1

Abstract

Hella is known as a strongly characteristic feature of Northern California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area (Waksler 2000, Boboc 2016). Based on data collected from public Twitter posts from 2013–2020 and examples drawn from Boboc (2016) and Waksler (2000), this paper investigates the origin, syntactic properties, and sociolinguistic aspects of hella. This study also draws on 1,389 responses to sentences (1)–(3), adapted from Boboc (2016), which were included in the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project’s survey work conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk in 2019.

1. This seat reclines hella!
   ‘This seat reclines a lot.’
2. I spoke Spanish today for the first time in hella days.
   ‘I spoke Spanish today for the first time in many days.’
3. That girl is hella smart.
   ‘That girl is very/really smart.’

The paper concludes that the use of hella in (3) is no longer restricted to speakers from Northern California and Seattle, but is being disseminated by younger speakers across the United States.

Recommended Citation

Lee, Lydia. 2025. It’s Hella Cool: Investigating the Properties of Hella. Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity 7 (1), 1–16.