Hello

Hello is a [salutation] or [greeting] in the [English language]. It is first attested in writing from 1826.[1]

Early uses

Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications in the US as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the Norwich Courier of [Norwich, Connecticut].[1] Another early use was an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee,[2] which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette.[3]

The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.[4]

Etymology

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo,[1] which came from [Old High German] "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman."[5] 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').[6] As in addition to hello, halloo,[7] hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.[8][9][10]

Telephone

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.[11] [Alexander Graham Bell] initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.[12][13] 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.[14]

By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as 'hello-girls' because of the association between the greeting and the telephone.[13][15]

Hullo

Hello may be derived from hullo, which the American [Merriam-Webster] dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello,"[16] 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.[17] The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.[18][19][20][21][22]

Hallo and hollo

Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa).[23] The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a [hunt] when the quarry was spotted:[24]

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.
— Coriolanus (I.viii.7), William Shakespeare

[Fowler's] has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864.[25] 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!

In many [Germanic languages], including [German], [Danish], [Norwegian], [Dutch] and [Afrikaans], "hallo" literally 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.[26]

[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).[27]

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.[28] Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil (meaning complete for things and healthy for beings) 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) (see also "goodbye" which is a contraction of "God be with you".

"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). This popular 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");
 }

Apple DOS HELLO program

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.

See also

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

References

External links

• Hello in more than 800 languages
• (Subscription)
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary: hollo, hullo