hele
- 1To cover or conceal a plant's roots, seedling, or stem, usually with soil.
Nurseries hele surplus seedlings in damp earth to keep them alive over winter.
As soon as received the plants should be unpacked and if they can not be planted at once they should be "heled in" i. e., placed in a trench and thoroughly watered.
1913, Nebraska HorticultureNote
The gardener's and nurseryman's use of the old verb survives mostly in the phrase hele in. Plants that cannot be set out at once are heled in as a holding measure: laid in a trench, covered and thoroughly watered, somewhere safe from standing water. It is sometimes hyphenated, heled-in. The covering that the 'keep secret' sense uses to hide something is used here to protect.
- 2To keep something hidden and undisclosed, especially as a member of the Freemasons or another secret society.
Initiates vowed to hele the order's mysteries from the uninitiated.
The second is concerned more especially with the obligation of the Neophyte Grade in which the Candidate is pledged to hele, conceal and never reveal the secret art and hidden mysteries of Masonry.
2019, William Harvey, Albert G. MackeyNote
Ritual is what mainly keeps this verb alive. The Masonic obligation binds a candidate to hele, conceal and never reveal, piling up near-synonyms for solemn emphasis. Outside that formula it is rare, archaic or dialectal, and older prose uses it for plain covering, as when a lion's neck is heled with hair. It comes from Old English helan, 'to conceal, cover, hide', and should not be confused with the old spelling of heal.
- 3Obsolete form of heal.
Note
A spelling of the curing verb from before the ea of heal became the standard written form. It works exactly as heal does: a poultice heles a wound, and a wound heles of itself. The two words cross in both directions, because heal also turns up, rarely, as a spelling of the 'conceal' verb. In older writing, context alone tells you whether something is being cured or covered.
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Origin
This word comes from Middle English helen, from Old English helan and helian, both meaning 'to conceal, cover, hide.' These trace back through Proto-Germanic to the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱel- ('to hide'), and are related to words like helmet, Latin cēlō ('conceal'), hole, and hull.