Why do we say 'Hello' on Phone? Check History of the word 'Hello'

Have you ever wondered why "Hello" is the universal word we say when we answer the phone? Though it feels so natural to our daily communication today, the story of "Hello" is, surprisingly, very new and closely linked with the invention of the telephone in the late 19th century.

The word "Hello" was first recorded in writing in the early 1800s, about 1826 or 1827. It then was not used much as a greeting but rather to get someone's attention or to express surprise—kind of like saying, "Hey, look here!" or "Well, what’s this?" The term evolved from older words like "hallo," "halloo," and "hollo," which were used to hail or call out to people, often in scenarios like hunting or calling ferry operators. These words trace their roots to Old High German and French, where they served as calls to attract attention.

Why do we say ‘Hello’ on the phone?

Before telephones, people used to greet each other based on the time of day, such as "Good morning" or "Good evening." Phones connected people over distances and across different time zones, rendering time-based greetings impractical. Enter the telephone, a revolutionary invention that needed a fresh approach to starting conversations.

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, said that people should answer the telephone with the word "Ahoy," a nautical greeting based on the Dutch word "hoi." He liked it well enough to use it throughout his life when answering the telephone, but "Ahoy" never caught on.

Popularization of the term Hello was rather done by Thomas Edison. Edison proposed in a letter in 1877 that the greeting used in a telephone conversation be Hello since it was easy to pronounce and could attract the attention of someone. Halloo! had been used before by Edison. in the course of his experiments with recorded sound, a scream to draw attention, which later developed into the simpler, "Hello."

Surprise to Standard Greeting As a result of the effects of Edison and the swift implementation of the telephone technology, the standard word to answer the phone was moved to the standard of Hello. Telephone operators were even as of the early 1880s called hello-girls because they repeated the word as an answer to the calls and therefore made it popular.

Today Hello is not just a word, it is a call to meet, it is a simple method to initiate any conversation, whether in the phone or in person. This brief cordial welcome has gone a long way since its inception as a call to attention to be among the most well known and used words in the world.

Phone Greetings Compared to Hello and Ahoy

• Hello: First put in writing in the 1820s, a call to attention or a show of surprise, that was not the original meaning of hello as a greeting. It also developed out of its predecessors such as halo in which hails were made or used to attract attention. Thomas Edison popularized the phrase "hello," as a greeting on the telephone in the late 19 th century. Edison recommended the use of the word hello to pick up the phone due to its simplicity, clarity and efficiency over the machine. By the 1880s, the standard form of greeting in telephones was the use of hello which later became the common verbal sign of greeting that is widely used nowadays.

• Ahoy: This is a much older greeting with nautical roots, and it was made use of by ship-to-ship communication by sailors. The reasonably accepted definition of the word ahoy originates in the Dutch hoi or perhaps in the Czech ahoy and was proposed as a preferred greeting when using the telephone by the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell. Bell preferred to use ahoy because it had been used successfully as a greeting or call but it never became popular outside of Bell's usage. The rest of his life he allegedly responded to the phone with ahoy.

Why "Hello" Won?

The reason behind the popularity of "Hello" was its neutrality and flexibility. In comparison to the word "ahoy" that was very reminiscent of a maritime and that the average person would not have understood, the word, hello was more of a direct call of attention and had no particular associations. The etiquette guides provided by the earliest telephone directories promoted the use of hello by Edison, and its use in the etiquette guides of the first telephone directories established it as part of the everyday usage of the telephone.

The popularity of using hello instead of ahoys denoted the change in the focus of the greetings on a case-related or time-based cue to greetings based on a universal, time-independent cue used in telephone conversations.

Other Phone Greetings

In the extremely exploratory days of the telephone when a standard greeting had not been generally professionalized, callers could share all sorts of things to initiate a conversation including: Are you there? or "Can you hear me?"

The equivalents of different cultures and languages also have their own equivalents but with the spread of English influence and the spread of telephones the world has recognized the equivalents.

Replacement words of hello like hi, hey and local expressions (howdy, whats up etc.) are context and formality dependent, however, the general and formal usage of hello is still the most common.

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