Old English hel, hell, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch hel and German Hölle, from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cover or hide'.

• Hell descends from an ancient Indo-European root with the sense ‘to cover, hide’ which also gave rise to Latin celare (root of conceal (Middle English) and occult) and to English hole (see hold), helmet (Late Middle English), and heel ‘to set a plant in the ground and cover its roots’. This was originally unconnected with the Old English word for the part of the foot, but rather came from helian ‘cover’.

  The infernal regions are regarded as a place of torment or punishment, and many curses and exclamations, such as a hell of a— or one hell of a—, depend on this. These expressions used to be shocking, and until the early 20th century were usually printed as h—l or h—. Alterations such as heck (late 19th century) served the same softening purpose in speech as well as in writing. The saying hell hath no fury like a woman scorned is a near quotation from a 1697 play by William Congreve: ‘Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, Nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.’ The dramatist Colley Cibber had used very similar words just a year earlier, and the idea was commonplace in the Renaissance. It can be traced back to the Greek dramatist Euripides of the 5th century bc. Strictly the ‘fury’ is one of the Furies of Greek mythology, frightening goddesses who avenged wrong and punished crime, but most people now use and interpret it in the sense ‘wild or violent anger’. The proverb the road to hell is paved with good intentions dates from the late 16th century, but earlier forms existed which omitted the first three words. Grumpy and misanthropic people everywhere will agree with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote in 1944: ‘Hell is other people.’