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The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello'

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by istjohn

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> Greek, meanwhile, uses "Γειά σου" (pronounced "yah-soo") as a typical informal greeting, offering a wish for health rather than a simple salutation.
Ironically, the root of "salutation" in latin is "salutare," to wish good health.
> According to linguists, elongated variations such as "heyyy" could be construed as flirtatious, "hellaw" might suggest you're from the southern US, "howdy" from western US, and the clipped "hi" may indicate a curt disposition.
Surely "howdy" derives from "how do you do?" and not "hello."

by Daub

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One advantage of using hello as a greeting is that it is agnostic of social rank. This made it the perfect choice for greeting people of unknown social rank on the phone.
Having traveled the world quite a bit I can attest to the ubiquity of the word hello… almost everywhere I go it is understood. ‘OK’ has a similar ubiquity, and it is interesting that both words are relatively new additions to the English (universal?) language.

by nephihaha

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It feels as if "hello" is fading out again. It was never completely universal. Where I grew up, people still say "aye aye" (not on a ship btw), along with the usual "good whatever".
I did once read a Christian complaining about it because it had the word "Hell" in it. A minority opinion of course.

by spyrja

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To be fair, the origins of "hello" go back much further than 600 years. Variations of it appear in Old Icelandic from almost 1000 years ago, and if you look at Old English texts from hundreds of years before that you will find greetings such as "Wes þū hāl!" (or roughly, "May you be well!"). In other words, all are based on salutations which have most likely been in use in one form or another for at least two millenia (if not longer).

by detourdog

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The article should have mentioned the Japanese phone greeting of Moshi Moshi. Which I think means I’m going to speak now. Which I think has a wonderful respect for stillness or quiet.

by romanhn

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I wonder how many non-English speaking countries adopted hello as the default phone greeting. In Russian "allo" is used, which is pretty clearly traced to Edison's hello.
On the other hand, my US-born teenage kids don't seem to be continuing this grand tradition, presumably due to most peer communication happening over text. When called, they just pick up the phone and wait for the caller to speak first. If I stay silent as well, I get an annoyed "yes?" eventually. My lessons in phone etiquette have gone unheeded.

by russellbeattie

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Random geek thing: Apple has used a couple different versions of its iconic "hello" image originally drawn by Susan Kare.
The first one starts with an "h" that has a loop at the top, the second doesn't. If you do an image search [1], you'll see the two versions. Both have been used in advertising over the years, both in print and in TV commercials.
Susan Kare sells a signed "hello" print on her website and I bought one - it uses the second version [2]. When Apple started their advertising campaign a few years ago using the original curlicue "hello" again, I looked at the print on my wall, and noticed the difference.
I emailed Susan about it and she responded that she hadn't even noticed! She couldn't remember anything about why there were the two versions. My Occam's razor guess is that Apple had recreated the original "hello" at some point and the designer decided to skip the loop. When Susan was making the prints years ago, she looked for a nice high resolution copy of it, and Apple hadn't made the curlicue version of it "official" yet, so the second was the nicest copy out there.
(If you look carefully, there's also a "hello" print ad from the 80s that looks like someone at an ad agency just took a go at it.)
1. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=macintosh+hello
2. https://kareprints.com/products/hello-on-blue

by chromatin

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> According to linguists, elongated variations such as "heyyy" could be construed as flirtatious, "hellaw" might suggest you're from the southern US,
I am from the Southern US and I am definitely not familiar with this phonetic form. Could be what a BBC writer _imagines_ a Southerner sounds like

by AstroNutt

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Back in the 80's, I'd call my best friend and when his Dad would answer, he would say, "yello". Is this a North Eastern thing? His family was from Pennsylvania.

by unnamed76ri

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Interesting read. How we got the word “goodbye” is also a cool story.

by ivanhoe

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I'm confused that, speaking of origins, they don't mention at all Spanish "hola", having literally the same meaning as hello?

by chistev

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What's the origin of "Hello World"?

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by davidw

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Ciao is an interesting one.
Kind of like you might say 'your humble servant' in English, the Venetians would say "sciavo vostro". Literally "your slave" - schiavo vostro in modern Italian. Which then morphed into "ciao".

by danans

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> According to linguists, elongated variations [of hello] such as "heyyy" ...
Not to be confused with the vocative interjection "Hey" which is likely thousands of years old, at least back to Proto Indo European, but probably earlier.

by DemocracyFTW2

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> The most commonly cited etymology is the Old High German "halâ" – a cry historically used to hail a ferryman.
To this day there's a ferry and company called Hal över ("take me across" in the local dialect, "Hol rüber" in standard German) https://www.hal-oever.de/de/home/ in Bremen, Northern Germany

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