Hal
name, noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A special temporary state of consciousness, generally understood to be the product of a Sufi's spiritual practices while on his way toward God.
- 2 Acronym of hardware abstraction layer. abbreviation, acronym, alt-of
- 3 A homicidal computer, an artificial intelligence that acts similarly to the HAL 9000 featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- 1 A diminutive of the male given names Henry, Harold and Harry.
"I prethee, good Prince Hal, help me to my horſe, good Kings ſonne."
- 2 Initialism of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited. India, abbreviation, alt-of, initialism
Example
More examples"Let me add some words about sentence fusion. A human is given two sentences and asked to produce a single coherent sentence that contains only the important information from the original two. This is a highly constrained summarization task. Investigations — carried out by Hal Daume and Daniel Marcu — has shown "that even at this restricted level, there is no measurable agreement between humans regarding what information should be considered important.""
Etymology
Arabic حَال (ḥāl, literally “state, condition”)
A diminutive lambdacism of Harry (compare Sally from Sarah and Moll from Mary).
From the fictional HAL 9000.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.