Why Do We Say Hello?

What do you do when you pass a friendly neighbor as you’re walking down the street? Mostly likely, you wave and say “Hello.” But have you ever stopped to think about why?

Hello is a relatively new greeting. The term first came into use in the United States in the early 1800s, but back then, people didn’t use it to say “hi.” They used more formal expressions for that, such as “How do you do?” or “Good evening.” The word hello was used to get someone’s attention or to express surprise. 

For example, if you caught your brother stealing your snack, you would say, “Hello there! Get your hands off my toast!” If you saw a spider in your shoe, you might shriek, “Hello! How did that get in there?”

But then the telephone came along, and everything started to change.

The inventor Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with inventing the telephone. And he did receive the first patent for a telephone, in 1876. But around the same time, many inventors were working on a variety of machines that could transmit voice. Some historians say that the first telephone was actually created by an Italian immigrant to the United States named Antonio Meucci, who had begun developing a telephone-like machine back in 1849. 

By the 1890s, people were beginning to have telephones in their homes. Early phones were very different from the cell phones we use today. For example, they didn’t have numbers you could dial, so it wasn’t possible to call someone directly. Back then, a telephone sent signals along wires, or lines, to a central office called a telephone exchange. When you wanted to call someone, you would pick up a part of your phone called the earpiece, which would automatically alert an operator at the telephone exchange. The operator would answer by saying something like “Are you there, sir?” or “What is wanted?” The operator would then connect your phone to the phone of the person you wanted to reach. But when the person on the other end picked up, what should they say? No one knew!

Bell suggested Ahoy ! as the word to use when answering a call. The word ahoy comes from the Dutch greeting hoi and was a salutation sailors used on ships. 

Thomas Edison, another inventor who worked on telephones, suggested the word hello. Unlike ahoy, hello caught on quickly—probably with the help of early phone books. For decades, printed phone books listed the telephone numbers of everyone in a particular area. The first of these publications also offered instructions on how to answer the phone properly. The suggested greeting? You guessed it: hello.

Bell was disappointed. He answered the phone with ahoy! for the rest of his life.

It didn’t take long before hello had become so popular that telephone operators began using it. In fact, operators, who were mainly women, were soon given the nickname “Hello Girls.” 

Eventually, hello became not just the standard way to greet someone over the phone, but an accepted way to greet someone in person as well. 

So the next time you answer your phone with hello, hi, hey, or some other variation, just think—if history had gone differently, you might be saying ahoy instead!

^{This article was originally published in the December 2022/January 2023 issue.}