"Hail fellow well met" is an English idiom used when referring to a person whose behavior is hearty, friendly, and congenial, typically in an excessive or insincere manner.
[citation needed] In 1609 Thomas Dekker used the term in The Gull’s Hornbook: "when at a new play you take up the twelve-penny room next the stage, (because the Lords and you may seem to be haile fellow wel-met) there draw forth this booke, read alowd, laugh alowd, and play the Antickes, that all the garlicke mouthd stinkards may cry out, Away with the fool."
The phrase appears in a section entitled "Sad"—in the Aeolus episode[citation needed]—in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses (1918), at the end of a description of the behaviour of newspaper men: "Funny the way the newspaper men veer about when they get wind of a new opening.
The early twentieth-century English novelist W. Somerset Maugham frequently used the term in his novels and short stories, in particular when he describes male characters of a genial, sociable, and hard-drinking temperament (e.g., Of Human Bondage,[3] The Trembling of a Leaf, and Then and Now).
[5] Kuiper uses the fact that this idiom is a phrase that is a part of the English lexicon (technically, a "phrasal lexical item"), and that there are different ways that the expression can be presented—for instance, as the common "hail-fellow-well-met," which appears as a modifier before the noun it modifies,[6][7] versus the more original greeting form of "Hail fellow.