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Did you know that the word hello did not enter the dictionary until 1883? And that it was a relatively rare greeting until Thomas Edison suggested it as a way of answering the recently-invented telephone?
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3 responses so far ↓
1 chris // Aug 18, 2008 at 6:48 am
so…. what was the informal greeting used at the time?
2 Joe T // Aug 18, 2008 at 9:43 am
Wonder if it was just an adaptation of “allo” in French and “hallo” in German.
3 German // Aug 18, 2008 at 11:32 am
“Hello’ is attested in American papers back to the 1820’s. Variants of the sound used to attract attention over fields or across waterways goes far back in Italian, French, German, Spanish and Dutch, hence the similarities today in those languages. Variants (’hollo’, ‘hollow’) are found in Shakespeare. In the 1880’s phone operators were known as ‘Hello Girls” after the greeting gained popularity.
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