Word.ws English Dictionary

hades

/ˈheɪdiːz/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Ireland/ˈheɪdiːz/

hades is the plural of hade.

hades is the third-person singular simple present indicative of hade.

Meaning of hade

Noun (1)

hade (plural hades)

  1. (Scotland, dialectal) State; order, estate, rank, degree, or quality.
    • And I tolde the of the good hade of my God which was vpo me:1838, The Holy Scriptures, Faithfully and Truly

Noun (2)

hade (plural hades)

  1. A slope; (in mining) the slope of a vein, fault or dike from the vertical; the complement of the dip.
    • The thick and well-growne fogge doth matt my smoother shades,
      And on the lower Leas, as on the higher Hades
      The daintie Clover growes (of grass the onely silke)1612, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, quoted in 1914, William Holden Hutton, Highways and Byways in Shakespeare's Country, page 34

Noun (3)

hade (plural hades)

  1. (UK, dialectal, obsolete) A headland; a strip of land at the side of a field upon which a plough may be turned.
    • … certeine arable landes some of them havinge hades of meadow and grasse grounde lieinge in the Southe fielde of Einsham.1615, in a Map in Corpus Christi College, Oxon, quoted in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary

See all 4 meanings of hade

Proper noun capitalized: Hades

Hades

  1. (Greek) The god of the underworld and ruler of the dead, son of Cronus and Rhea, brother of Zeus and Poseidon.
  2. (Greek) The underworld, the domain of Hades, by transference from its god.
    • I have just returned from a visit to Hades, and I had a devilishly good time. […] To the ancients, Hades was the great underworld on the River Styx described so graphically by Homer in the “Odyssey.” Even today, visitors follow the same directions to get to Hades as those recited for Ulysses by the...1971 March 7, Marcus Brooke, “To Hades and Back (Hic) With Homer’s Help”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 12 Aug 2024
  3. In the Septuagint Bible, the Greek translation of Sheol.
  4. Hell.
    1. (specifically, chiefly Eastern Orthodoxy) Hell as a waiting place for damned souls before the Last Judgement, after which they may be cast in Gehenna.

Origin of hades

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ᾍδης (Hāídēs).

Words formed from hades

Phrases with hades

Questions about hades

What does hades mean?
Hades means the god of the underworld and ruler of the dead, son of Cronus and Rhea, brother of Zeus and Poseidon.
What is hades the plural of?
Hades is the plural of hade.
What part of speech is hades?
Hades is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce hades?
Hades is pronounced /ˈheɪdiːz/.

Words near hades in the dictionary

  1. Hadens
  2. Hader
  3. Hadera
  4. Haderas
  5. Haders
  6. hades
  7. Hadfield
  8. Hadfield steel
  9. Hadfield steels
  10. Hadfields
  11. hadgee

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hades (page history and authors); Hades (page history and authors); hade (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-Hades.wav.

Cite this entry: “hades.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hades. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.