hells

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of hell.

   Ancient cosmologies often imagined multiple hells stacked beneath the surface of the earth.

   The poet wove together the hells of several traditions into a single nightmarish realm.

   Note

   A regular plural that only the countable uses of hell can take. It can name several places of suffering at once, as in the private hells of a hard life, or several gambling dens, each one a hell. The exclamation has the same spelling but nothing plural about it. The noun usually takes an article or a modifier, while the exclamation stands alone at the head of a sentence.

2. 2
   interjectionvulgarcolloquial

   A coarse exclamation of anger, frustration, or surprise; an emphatic variant of the interjection "hell."

   Hells, they've raised the rent on the apartment again this year.

   Hells, who left the front gate wide open in this storm?

   Similarhell

   Note

   An outburst that clears its throat before saying something stronger. It comes first, takes a comma, and is followed by a sharper restatement of the point: "hells, you're fucking feared." Jonathan French's The True Bastards (2019) and Abigail Owen's The Shadows Rule All (2024) give it to fantasy characters in dialogue. It is colloquial and sometimes vulgar, so keep it to speech and fiction rather than formal prose.

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