What was "well met!" supposed to mean?

I know it was a sort of archaic greeting, but I don't know how to interpret the actual words.

I had a foggy idea that it meant "It is good that we met here and now", but even then, "well met" is not the intuitive way to say this.

Does anyone know why "well met" was used to express greeting?

Solution 1:

Wikipedia offers a succinct explanation:

"Hail fellow well met" is a somewhat archaic English idiom used either as an exaggerated greeting or referring to a person who is sociable and constantly making an effort to win friends. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a 1589 quotation for this phrase as a friendly greeting. The OED also gives quotations for the related phrase "hail fellow", a greeting that apparently dates to medieval times. "Well met" appears to have been added to the phrase in the 16th century to intensify its friendliness. This additional term seems to derive from the concept of "good to meet you", and also from the meaning of "meet" as something literally the right size for a given situation.

Further, Merriam Webster identifies the word hail-fellow-well-met as an adjective to mean "heartily friendly and informal".

As the graphs below indicate, there are some interesting relatively inverse correlations between American and British English usage, particularly from 1830 to 1840, 1900 - 1920 and 1950 - 1960. Both graphs indicate that the phrase (or word) is no longer commonly used.

American English usage:

British English usage:

Solution 2:

Well-met does show up in some dictionaries:

adjective Archaic. (used as a salutation or part of a salutation). ...Origin: 1580-90.

Hail-fellow-well-met can be traced back to the same time:

1580s, from a familiar greeting

as @HaL's answer explains further.

As for "Well met," it's used as a greeting in writing at least through the early 1900s - L. Frank Baum uses it, for example. (In this case it's used as a greeting to a new person - as today we would use nice to meet you. I think later examples may have that meaning more than earlier ones, but I am not sure.)

"Well met, Stranger!" cried the Patchwork Girl with a whoop of laughter. "You are quite the funniest individual I have seen in all my travels."

Readings from Lectures to working men, Rev. Arthur Mursell, ~1867, indicates that the phrase meant something like good to see you, but perhaps was not one all speakers would use:

Going back further, Shakespeare uses "well met" liberally, for example:

—Well met, honest gentlemen.
—By my troth, well met; Come, sit, sit, and a song.

—You are well met once again.
—And so are you.

as a "kind of salutation" (clip from a Shakespeare dictionary that cross-references where words and phrases occur):

Solution 3:

You've pretty much got the sense of it. Think of it as the result of somebody dropping most of the words out of the phrase "it is well that we have met". (It's not modern practice to recognize the verb "to be" as calling for the adverb "well" here, but the sense of it is still clear.)

What doesn't come across in the modern language is that there's an almost congratulatory tone to it; the meeting is being spoken of in the sense of an active verb, and the person greeted being complimented on it, so there's an implication that the actions that led to the meeting are approved of.

The contrary sentiment, "ill met", goes the same way; in addition to saying "I could've lived without seeing you", there's an implication of "what you were doing that leads to this meeting is bad".