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Hello

First use
Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications as early as 1833. These include an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee,[2] which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette.[3]

The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.[4]

Etymology
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo,[5] which came from Old High German "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman."[6] It also connects the development of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla, whose origin is in the French holà (roughly, 'whoa there!', from French là 'there').[7] As in addition to hello, halloo,[8] hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.[citation needed]

Telephone
The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo.[9] Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.[10][11] However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh:

Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.

What you think? Edison - P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.[12]

By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as 'hello-girls' due to the association between the greeting and the telephone.[11]

Hullo
Hello may be derived from hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello,"[13] 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.[14] The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.[15][16][17][18][19]

Hallo and hollo
Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa).[13] The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted:[13]

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.

—Coriolanus (I.viii.7), William Shakespeare
Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864.[20] It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798:

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo!

Hallo is also German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans for Hello. It is used in the Dutch language as early as 1797 in a letter from Willem Bilderdijk to his sister in law as a remark of astonishment.[21]

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).[22]

The Old English verb, hǽlan (1. wv/t1b 1 to heal, cure, save; greet, salute; gehǽl! Hosanna!), may be the ultimate origin of the word.[23] Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil (meaning complete for things and healthy for beings) and other similar words of Germanic origin. Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou", meaning a wish for good health) (see also "goodbye" which is a contraction of "God be with you".

Cognates

The word "hello" is found in many other languages. It is often only used when answering the telephone, or as an informal greeting.

Language Cognate Usage
Afrikaans hallo general greeting
Albanian alo when answering the telephone
Arabic آلو ālō when answering the telephone
Assamese হেল্লো hêllo when answering the telephone
Bengali হ্যালো hêlo when answering the telephone
Bulgarian ало (alo) when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Cantonese 哈佬！ (Hah Loe!) friendly (informal) greeting
Catalan hola! friendly (informal) greeting
Croatian halo? when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Czech Haló? when answering the telephone
Danish hallo! when answering the telephone
Dutch hallo! general greeting, normally not used for answering the telephone
Esperanto ha lo? when answering the telephone
Estonian hallo; halloo when answering the telephone
Finnish haloo? when answering the telephone
French allô? when answering the telephone
German Hallo?, Hallo! when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Greek Παρακαλώ?(parakalo), Ναι! (Ne) when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Gujarati હલો (haló) when answering the telephone
Hungarian helló! friendly (informal) greeting
halló! when answering the telephone
Hebrew הָלוֹ (hallo) when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Hindi हलो (haló) when answering the telephone
Icelandic Halló when answering the telephone
Irish Heileo Rarely used
Japanese ハロー　(harō) friendly (informal) greeting
Kannada halloa when answering the telephone
Khmer allô when answering the telephone
Lithuanian alio? when answering the telephone
Macedonian ало (alo) when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Mandarin 哈啰！ (Hǎ Luó!) friendly (informal) greeting
Marathi hello when answering the telephone
Norwegian hallo! general greeting
Oriya ହାଲୋ/ହେଲୋ (hāló/héló) when answering the telephone
Persian الو alo when answering the telephone
Polish halo when answering the telephone
Portuguese alô? when answering the telephone (Brazil only)
Romanian alo when answering the telephone
Russian алло (allo), алё when answering the telephone
Serbian хало/halo when answering the telephone / friendly (informal) greeting
Spanish ¡hola! friendly (informal) greeting
¿aló? (Latin America) when answering the telephone
Swedish hallå!
Tagalog helo!
Tamil அலோ? (ā lo) when answering the telephone
Thai ฮัลโหล (hān lǒ) when answering the telephone
Turkish alo! when answering the telephone
Ukrainian ало! when answering the telephone
Vietnamese a lô! when answering the telephone
"Hello, World" computer program
Main article: Hello world program
Students learning a new computer programming language will often begin by writing a "Hello, world!" program, which outputs that greeting to a display screen or printer. The widespread use of this tradition arose from an introductory chapter of the book The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie, which reused the following example taken from earlier memos by Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs:

int main()
{
printf("hello, world");
}
The Apple DOS HELLO program
A diskette formatted to boot Apple DOS 3.x on the Apple II series of computers will look for a BASIC program to run automatically after the operating system has booted. By default, the name of the program is HELLO, and is specified as a parameter of the INIT command used to format a floppy disk. For the HELLO program to work, it has to be created in the same language (Integer BASIC or Applesoft BASIC) that is present in the language ROM of the system the disk is being booted on.

Perception of "Hello" in other nations
In some other nations, especially the ones that had little contact with foreigners at the time, Westerners were often viewed as people who constantly said "hello" and little else. Chinese novelist Jung Chang describes this view as follows:

In my mind... foreigners said 'hello' all the time, with an odd intonation.... When boys played 'guerrilla warfare,' which was their version of cowboys and Indians, the enemy side would have thorns glued onto their noses and say 'hello' all the time.

—Chang, Jung[24]

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