Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is attested in writing as early as the 1830s.
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Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications as early as 1833. These include an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee,[1] which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette.[2]
The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo,[3] which came from Old High German "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman."[4] 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').[5] As in addition to hello, hallo and hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.
The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo.[6] Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.[7][8] However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh:
Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What you think? Edison - P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.
By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as 'hello-girls' due to the association between the greeting and the telephone.[8]
Hello may be derived from Hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello,"[9] 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.[10] The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.[11][12][13][14][15]
Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa).[9] The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted:[9] Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864.[16]
It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798:
And the good south wind still blew behind,But no sweet bird did follow, Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo!
Hallo is also German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans for Hello.
If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.—Coriolanus (I.viii.7), William Shakespeare
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).[17] Hallo is also used by many famous authors like Enid Blyton. Example:"Hallo!", chorused the 600 children.
The Old English verb, hǽlan (1. wv/t1b 1 to heal, cure, save; greet, salute; gehǽl! Hosanna!), may be the ultimate origin of the word.[18] Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil and other similar words of Germanic origin. Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou", meaning a wish for good health).
The word "hello" is found in many other languages. It is often only used when answering the telephone, or as an informal greeting.
| Language | Cognate | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Afrikaans | hallo | |
| Albanian | alo | when answering the telephone |
| Arabic | آلو ālō | when answering the telephone |
| Bengali | হ্যালো hêlo | when answering the telephone |
| Bulgarian | ало (alo) | when answering the telephone |
| Catalan | hola! | friendly (informal) greeting |
| Croatian | halo? | when answering the telephone |
| Czech | Haló? | when answering the telephone |
| Danish | hallo! | when answering the telephone |
| Dutch | hallo! | general greeting, normally not used for answering the telephone. |
| Esperanto | ha lo? | when answering the telephone |
| Estonian | hallo; halloo | when answering the telephone |
| Finnish | haloo? | when answering the telephone |
| French | allô? | when answering the telephone |
| German | Hallo! | |
| Gujarati | hello! | when answering the telephone |
| Hungarian | helló! | friendly (informal) greeting |
| halló! | when answering the telephone | |
| Hebrew | הָלוֹ (hallo) | when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting |
| North Indians | Haanjee! | when answering the telephone |
| Icelandic | Halló | when answering the telephone |
| Irish | Heileo | Rarely used |
| Japanese | ハロー (harō) | friendly (informal) greeting |
| Kannada | halloa | when answering the telephone |
| Khmer | allô | when answering the telephone |
| Lithuanian | alio? | when answering the telephone |
| Macedonian | ало (alo) | when answering the telephone |
| Marathi | hello | when answering the telephone |
| Norwegian | hallo! | general greeting |
| Persian | الو alo | when answering the telephone |
| Polish | halo | when answering the telephone |
| Portuguese | alô? | when answering the telephone (Brazil only) |
| Romanian | alo | when answering the telephone |
| Russian | алло (allo), алё | when answering the telephone |
| Serbian | хало/halo | when answering the telephone |
| Spanish | ¡hola! | friendly (informal) greeting |
| ¿aló? | (Latin America) when answering the telephone | |
| Swedish | hallå! | |
| Tagalog | helo! | |
| Turkish | alo! | when answering the telephone |
| Vietnamese | a lô! | when answering the telephone |
Students learning a new computer programming language will often begin by writing a "Hello, world!" program, which outputs that greeting to a display screen or printer. The widespread use of this tradition arose from an introductory chapter of the book The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie, which reused the following example taken from earlier memos by Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs:
int main() { printf("hello, world"); }
A diskette formatted to boot Apple DOS 3.x on the Apple II series of computers will look for a BASIC program to run automatically after the operating system has booted. By default, the name of the program is HELLO, and is specified as a parameter of the INIT command used to format a floppy disk. For the HELLO program to work, it has to be created in the same language (Integer BASIC or Applesoft BASIC) that is present in the language ROM of the system the disk is being booted on.
In some other nations, especially the ones that had little contact with foreigners at the time, Westerners were often viewed as people who constantly said "hello" and little else. Jung Chang describes this view as follows:
In my mind... foreigners said 'hello' all the time, with an odd intonation.... When boys played 'guerrilla warfare,' which was their version of cowboys and Indians, the enemy side would have thorns glued onto their noses and say 'hello' all the time.—Chang, Jung[19]