Hello: Origin of the Word & How It Caught On

Hello is one of the most frequently used words in everyday speech, but it wasn't recorded until around 1883. Its earliest ancestor, hallow, dates back to at least 1340 and was used by Chaucer.  Hallow probably derives from the Old French hallo-er, meaning "to pursue crying or shouting." Hello came into fashion with the invention of the telephone late in the 19th century, replacing the earlier variant hullo.

Alexander Graham Bell first exhibited his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and by the mid-1890s, about 300,000 phones were in use. By World War I, the number reached 10.5 million. Learning to use this new device, Americans wondered what to say to start a telephone conversation. Bell’s choice for an initial greeting was “Ahoy.” Others argued for more formal greetings like “What is wanted?” or “Are you there?”

In 1877, Thomas Edison, the famous inventor who developed the first practical telephone transmitter, solved the problem by introducing “Hello!” as the standard English telephone greeting. The word had been around for a little while; Mark Twain had used it in Tom Sawyer. But why Edison chose to use it is not known. Whatever the derivation, hello had become standard by 1880 when Mark Twain used it in his comic sketch, A Telephonic Conversation.