Why Do We Say Hello? (2024)

You hear it every day, you use it on the phone. It’s so common you barely even notice it anymore. Our omnipresent greeting "hello" has become so ubiquitous that it's almost boring. But what if we were to change it up? Come up with something sure to get us noticed. Something like…um… "ahoy"?

Though it sounds like we should save that one for" International Talk Like a Pirate Day," it was very close to being our preferred version of "hello," at least if Alexander Graham Bell had had his way.

Though we use it so often it feels as if we are well-acquainted, we don’t really know our hello all that well. For instance, most people don’t realize that Thomas Edison was the one who popularized its use on the newly invented telephone, or that it has only been in use as a greeting since the 1800s. Hello, compared to good morning or how are you, is just a babe in the word woods when we look at the history of English.

A History of Greetings

While hello might not be that long in the tooth, that doesn’t mean we didn’t greet each other before it came along. In fact, we find a number of different English greetings dating as far back as Old English, well over 1,000 years ago.

In his book The History of Early English, linguist Keith Johnson notes that a very common form of greeting in that period was one that asked about one’s health, as in Hū færst þū, meaning "How fare you?" or Wes hāl, "Be well." Now we know we can blame our Germanic forefathers (or mothers) for our formulaic need to ask "How are you?" even when we actually don’t want the answer.

It might seem that the word hāl bears resemblance to and thus is a possible progenitor of our modern hello, but it is actually unrelated. Instead, it is the ancestor of what became a popular greeting during the early modern English period, hail, one which we now find a bit distasteful due to its more recent associations. The salute "heil," etched in our collective mind as the refrain of the Nazi regime, actually dates back to the 13th-century Scandinavian word, heil. And in Shakespeare’s day, such a hail was often used as a respectful greeting, i.e. “Hail Ceasar!”

According to historical linguist Joachim Grzega, also quite common in that era were expressions that made reference to the time of day, like the Shakespearean favorite, "Good morrow," a form of which appears as early as the 1300s in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. Of course, we still bandy about this type of greeting today in pleasantries like “Good morning” or “Good evening.”

In other words, though the words might change, the need for greetings as a social greaser has long been with us.

The Birth of "Hello"

So then, if health and hail were mainstays of our greetings over the centuries, how did we go from how fares thou to hello? Well, we have Thomas Edison and the phone book to thank for making hello what it is today. Though Alexander Graham Bell ultimately gave us the telephone, Edison created a better design for the transmitter for Bell’s rival Western Union—giving him a stake in the new world of long-distance talking. And he felt "hello" would be a good conversation starter.

Edison didn’t invent the word—it had been in use as an attention-getter (i.e. "Hallo! You there") since at least 1827. But it wasn’t until a bit later—the Oxford English Dictionary cites evidence from an 1856 newspaper text as an example—that we see it used as a true greeting. Still, it wasn’t popularized until Edison commandeered it for use to attract attention to one’s desire to make a connection with someone on the other side of the receiver. After all, when all we hear is heavy breathing on the line, it doesn’t really make us keen to chat.

But hello had pretty heady competition—the man who invented the telephone also had something to say on this matter. Bell preferred the nautical term ahoy, typically used by sailors for greeting at a distance, to serve a similar purpose on the phone. He allegedly used that expression himself until his death.

Though ahoy as a greeting didn’t catch on, we do find a few common day fans of Bell’s term—Monty Burns, a character on the TV show The Simpsons, carried on the ‘ahoy’ tradition when answering the phone.

Why did Edison’s hello win out over his rival Bell’s ahoy? Because of what once was affectionately known as the White Pages, according to the author of The Phone Book, Ammon Shea. Hello, not ahoy, was suggested as the appropriate greeting in the introductory telephone how-tos that appeared in the first published telephone books.

Since the technology was new, people actually read the instructions, unlike today where we prefer to wing it and hope for the best. Other gems found in the early phone guide? Talk into the mouthpiece and finish the call with a “That is all!” Guess that one didn’t have as much celebrity support.

So, in the end, we can thank Mr. Edison for much more than just our light bulbs—he also helped preserve ahoy as the exclusive domain of the pirate. And that, me hearties, is something for which we landlubbers should be very thankful.

References