‘Hail’ and ‘Hale’
- (a)‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means wind storm
- (b)‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means strong and healthy
- (c)‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means to greet with enthusiastic approval
- (d)‘Hail’ means strong and healthy, and ‘hale’ means pellets of frozen rain
Correct — B, ‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means strong and healthy. Hail is the frozen precipitation that clatters on a tin roof. Hale survives in modern English almost only in the phrase ‘hale and hearty’, where it describes someone sound in body, and the extra i belongs to the weather word alone.
- (a)‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means wind storm — A wind storm is a gale, not a hale — the option borrows a rhyming word to look plausible.
- (c)‘Hail’ means pellets of frozen rain, and ‘hale’ means to greet with enthusiastic approval — Greeting with enthusiastic approval is a second sense of hail itself (we hail a hero, or hail a cab), so it cannot be the meaning of hale.
- (d)‘Hail’ means strong and healthy, and ‘hale’ means pellets of frozen rain — The halves are swapped: frozen rain is hail and the healthy sense is hale.
The pair is a near-homophone set. Hail is a weather noun that also works as a verb of greeting, while hale is an adjective meaning free from infirmity.
Each item in this section prints two confusable spellings and four glosses, and asks which line gives both words their own meaning. Pin down the word you are certain of first — almost every candidate knows hail as frozen rain — because that single fix already kills any option that hands hail to the other meaning.
- ‘Hale and hearty’ is the standard idiom for someone robust in old age, and it takes the hale spelling.
- Hail doubles as a verb meaning to greet or to acclaim, which is the sense the paper dangles as a decoy.
- A gale is a strong wind. Hail is frozen precipitation. Neither sense belongs to hale.
- Reading hale as a version of gale because the two rhyme.
- Assigning ‘to greet with approval’ to hale when it is a sense of hail.
Asked as a paired-words item — pick the option that gives the correct meaning of both spellings.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the option that gives the correct meaning of ‘Hoard’ and ‘Horde’.
- (a)‘Hoard’ means a large crowd, and ‘horde’ means a hidden store
- (b)‘Hoard’ means a hidden store, and ‘horde’ means a large crowd
- (c)‘Hoard’ means a hidden store, and ‘horde’ means to save money
- (d)‘Hoard’ means to greet, and ‘horde’ means a hidden store
Answer(b) ‘Hoard’ means a hidden store, and ‘horde’ means a large crowd — a hoard of coins, a horde of invaders.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Fill in the blank with the correct word. At eighty my grandfather is still __________ and hearty.
- (a)hail
- (b)hale
- (c)gale
- (d)whale
Answer(b) hale — the fixed idiom is ‘hale and hearty’.