Hello

Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826.

Early uses

''Hello'', with that spelling, was used in publications in the U.S. as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the ''Norwich Courier'' of Norwich, Connecticut. Another early use was an 1833 American book called ''The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee'', which was reprinted that same year in '' The London Literary Gazette''. The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.

Etymology

According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', ''hello'' is an alteration of ''hallo'', ''hollo'', which came from Old High German "''halâ'', ''holâ'', emphatic imperative of ''halôn'', ''holôn'' to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman". It also connects the development of ''hello'' to the influence of an earlier form, ''holla'', whose origin is in the French ''holà'' (roughly, 'whoa there!', from French ''là'' 'there'). As in addition to ''hello'', ''halloo'', ''hallo'', ''hollo'', ''hullo'' and (rarely) ''hillo'' also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.

Telephone

Before the telephone, verbal greetings often involved a time of day, such as "good morning". When the telephone began connecting people in different time zones, greetings without time gained popularity.

Thomas Edison is credited with popularizing ''hullo'' as a telephone greeting. In previous decades, ''hullo'' had been used as an exclamation of surprise (used early on by Charles Dickens in 1850) and ''halloo'' was shouted at ferry boat operators by people who wanted to catch a ride. According to one account, ''halloo'' was the first word Edison yelled into his strip phonograph when he discovered recorded sound in 1877. Shortly after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he answered calls by saying "'' ahoy ahoy''", borrowing the term used on ships. There is no evidence the greeting caught on. Edison suggested ''Hello!'' on August 15, 1877, in a letter to the president of Pittsburgh's Central District and Printing Telegraph Company, T. B. A. David:

The first name tags to include ''Hello'' may have been in 1880 at Niagara Falls, which was the site of the first telephone operators convention. By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as " hello-girls" because of the association between the greeting and the telephone.

A 1918 novel uses the spelling "Halloa" in the context of telephone conversations.

Hullo, hallo, and other spellings

''Hello'' might be derived from an older spelling variant, ''hullo'', which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello", and which was originally used as an exclamation to call attention, an expression of surprise, or a greeting. ''Hullo'' is found in publications as early as 1803. The word ''hullo'' is still in use, with the meaning ''hello''.

''Hello'' is alternatively thought to come from the word ''hallo'' (1840) via ''hollo'' (also ''holla'', ''holloa'', ''halloo'', ''halloa''). The definition of ''hollo'' is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted:

Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864. It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' written in 1798:

In many Germanic languages, including German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans, "''hallo''" directly translates into English as "hello". In the case of Dutch, it was used as early as 1797 in a letter from Willem Bilderdijk to his sister-in-law as a remark of astonishment.

Webster's dictionary from 1913 traces the etymology of ''holloa'' to the Old English ''halow'' and suggests: "Perhaps from ah + lo; compare Anglo Saxon ealā".

According to the ''American Heritage Dictionary'', ''hallo'' is a modification of the obsolete ''holla'' (''stop!''), perhaps from Old French ''hola'' (''ho'', ho! + ''la'', there, from Latin ''illac'', that way).

"Hello, World" computer program

Students learning a new computer programming language will often begin by writing a "Hello, World!" program, which does nothing but issue the message "Hello, World!" to the user (such as by displaying it on a screen). It has been used since the earliest programs, and in many computer languages. This tradition was further popularised after being printed in an introductory chapter of the book ''The C Programming Language'' by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. The book had reused an example taken from a 1974 memo by Kernighan at Bell Laboratories.

See also

*Aloha
*As-salamu alaykum
*Ciao
*Kia ora
*Namaste
*Shalom
* World Hello Day

References

Further reading

Hello! Hello!
an article from 1880 in the ''San Francisco Examiner'' discussing use of the word on the telephone

External links

{{Wiktionary, hello, hi, hey, hiya

Hello in more than 800 languages

OED online entry for ''hollo''
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* Merriam-Webster Dictionary
hollohullo

Greeting words and phrases
English words