Hella is an American slang term that originated in Oakland, California but has since spread to become native slang to all of the San Francisco Bay Area. It is used as an adverb such as in "hella bad" or "hella good" and was eventually added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. It is possibly 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 since its grammatical usage does not align with those phrases. 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".
