Hella

Hella is an American slang term that originated in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has since spread to become native slang to all of Northern California. It is used to describe such as 'hella bad' or 'hella good', and eventually added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. It is probably a contraction of the phrase "hell of a" or "hell of a lot [of]", in turn reduced to "hell of", though some scholars doubt this etymology. It often appears in place of the words "really," "a lot," "totally," "very" and in some cases "yes". Whereas hell of a is generally used with a noun, according to linguist Pamela Munro, hella is primarily used to modify an adjective such as "good."

According to lexicographer Allan A. Metcalf, the word is a marker of Northern California dialect. According to Colleen Cotter, "Southern Californians know the term ... but rarely use it." Sometimes the term grippa is used to mock "NorCal" dialect, with the actual meaning being the opposite of hella.

Hella has likely existed in California English since at least the mid-1970s. By 1993, Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at the University of California, Santa Barbara collated materials from an urban high school (Mount Eden High School) in the Bay Area, and found that hella was "used among Bay Area youth of all racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds and both genders."Hella remains part of the dialect of Northern California, where it has grown in popularity.

By 1997 the word had spread to hip hop culture, though it remained a primarily West Coast term. With the release of the 2001 No Doubt song "Hella Good," one Virginian transplant in California "fear[ed] the worst: nationwide acceptance of this wretched term." Since the early '90s 'hella' has been used regularly in the Pacific Northwest as a common slang term, particularly in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Popular area rappers Blue Scholars and Macklemore regularly use the term in their lyrics; Macklemore uses the word several times in his worldwide hit song"Thrift Shop".

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