word boundary in grep shell

In the case of the perl we use "\b" to specify the word boundary.i.e. in the case of perl
if we want to match a word hello we can use /\bhello\b/ which matches word hello as a separate word or when it occurs as the first word without being combined with someother word.

In Shell if we want to match a word in a word boundary using grep we can use "-w" option of grep which matches the word in a word context.
Using
grep -w "hello" filename 

is same as

grep "\<hello\>" filename

\<  - starts a word boundary.
\>  - ends a word boundary.

grep "\<hello" filename will search for hello,hellobuddy,helloname everyname starting with hello but not Maahello since it starts with a word boundary.