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Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826.
Thomas Edison is credited with popularizing hullo as a telephone greeting. In previous decades, hullo had been used as an exclamation of surprise (used early on by Charles Dickens in 1850) and halloo was shouted at ferry boat operators by people who wanted to catch a ride. According to one account, halloo was the first word Edison yelled into his strip phonograph when he discovered recorded sound in 1877. Shortly after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he answered calls by saying " ahoy ahoy", borrowing the term used on ships. There is no evidence the greeting caught on. Edison suggested Hello! on August 15, 1877, in a letter to the president of Pittsburgh's Central District and Printing Telegraph Company, T. B. A. David:
The first name tags to include Hello may have been in 1880 at Niagara Falls, which was the site of the first telephone operators convention. By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as "hello-girls" because of the association between the greeting and the telephone.
A 1918 novel uses the spelling "Halloa" in the context of telephone conversations.
Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa). The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a fox hunt when the quarry was spotted:
Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864. The New Fowler's, revised third edition by R. W. Burchfield, Oxford University Press. , p. 356. It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798:
In many Germanic languages, including German, Danish language, Norwegian, Dutch language and Afrikaans, " hallo" directly 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.Bilderdijk, Willem Liefde en ballingschap. Brieven 1795–1797 (ed. Marita Mathijsen). Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam/Antwerp 1997
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).
Hullo, hallo, and other spellings
Hello might be derived from an older spelling variant, hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello", 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. The Sporting Magazine. London (1803). Volume 23, p. 12. The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.
"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). It has been used since the earliest programs, and in many computer languages. This tradition was further popularised after being printed in an introductory chapter of the book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. The book had reused an example taken from a 1974 memo by Kernighan at Bell Labs.
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