In a BBC Culture article, Jonathan Wells marks 200 years since “hello” first appeared in print and asks what our greetings say about us.
The origins of hello
Wells reports that the printed history of “hello” is shorter than most people would guess.
We use “hello” dozens of times a day without thinking – during phone calls, emails and face-to-face encounters. We sing it along with Adele and Lionel Richie, and we have watched it spun into moments of screen gold in Jerry Maguire (“You had me at hello”), and Scarface (“Say hello to my little friend!”). It’s been used to sell everything from mobile phones (Motorola’s “Hello, Moto”) to lingerie (Wonderbra’s iconic “Hello boys”), and it has been borrowed to name computer programs and celebrity magazines.
In print, this ubiquitous, friendly greeting has a surprisingly short history. Two centuries ago, on 18 January 1826, “hello” made what is thought to be its earliest recorded appearance on the page, in a Connecticut newspaper called The Norwich Courier. Hidden among the column inches, it was a modest in-ink debut for a word that would go on to greet much of the modern world.
– Jonathan Wells from BBC
- Its earliest known appearance in print came on 18 January 1826, in a Connecticut paper called The Norwich Courier.
- By the 1850s it had reached Britain and was showing up in publications such as the London Literary Gazette.
- The older roots are disputed. The Old High German “halâ,” once used to hail a ferryman, is the most commonly cited source. The Oxford English Dictionary also points to “halloo,” a hunting call.
- Early spellings included hullo, hillo, and holla. The OED lists “hollo” as the earliest English form, from the late 16th Century.
- Simon Horobin of Oxford tells the BBC that written evidence for a colloquial word like this is patchy, which makes a firm timeline hard to pin down.
- Charles Dickens preferred “hullo.” Alexander Graham Bell stuck with “halloo” and once argued for “ahoy!” on the telephone. Thomas Edison backed “hello,” believing it would carry clearly over poor phone lines, and his choice won out.
Hello around the world
Wells then looks at how other languages built their own greetings.
- Germanic and Scandinavian forms such as “hallo” and “hallå” sound harder and more efficient than the softer “hola” and “olá” of the Romance languages.
- Some greetings carry traces of history, such as the Dutch-derived “hallo” in Afrikaans and “óla” in Tetum, a legacy of Portuguese influence in Timor-Leste.
- Several words work as both hello and goodbye. “Ciao” comes from a Venetian phrase meaning “at your service,” and the French “salut” covers both arriving and leaving. Hawaiian “aloha” carries affection, and Hebrew “shalom” carries peace.
- Alessandro Duranti of UCLA warns against reading national character straight from a greeting. He suggests secondary greetings tell us more. English asks “how are you?”, Greek wishes health with “yah-soo,” and some Polynesian greetings ask where someone is going.
- What greetings do reliably signal, Duranti says, is social structure. Equals greet each other differently than people of unequal status, so a greeting marks intimacy and distance.
Hello in the digital age
Finally, Wells turns to what texting and social media have done to the habit.
- Christian Ilbury of the University of Edinburgh notes that on apps like WhatsApp we are always mid-conversation, so an opening “hello” often becomes unnecessary.
- Ilbury has catalogued creative spellings in digital language, from “hellooooo” to “hiiiiiii” and “heyyyyy.”
- At the same time, most digital greetings are short and clipped, and the waving-hand emoji now stands in for the word entirely.
- Wells points out this echoes the early 1800s, when the spoken greeting was fairly stable but the written spelling varied widely.
- His closing thought is that the impulse behind the word has not changed. It is still an act of recognition, a way of announcing your presence and asking to be acknowledged.
Wells notes that two hundred years of print have not fixed this word in place. It keeps getting stretched, shortened, and swapped out, and that may be the most honest thing about it. A greeting is less a piece of vocabulary than a small social gesture, and gestures change with the people making them.
Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my AI exploration process. For more information, check out the original article listed below.