Hello and greetings
Hello is the default greeting of the English language and one of the first words its learners acquire, yet it is a strikingly recent arrival: the word is first attested in writing in 1826, and it became the standard English salutation only in the second half of the 19th century. It emerged from a family of older hailing cries — hallo, hollo, holla, halloo and hullo — used to call attention across a distance, and its rise was bound up with the telephone, for which Thomas Edison championed it over Alexander Graham Bell's preferred "ahoy". Greetings themselves are far older than any single word for them: every known human culture greets, and greeting is a ritual act of acknowledgement that establishes, tests and maintains social relationships.
The word sits at the intersection of language, technology and culture. As a linguistic item it is an interjection and a phatic expression, its meaning carried as much by intonation and context as by its letters; it can be stretched, clipped, spelled with any of the five vowels, and replaced outright by a wave emoji. As a technical term it names the HELO handshake by which email servers introduce themselves, and the "Hello, world" program that has served for half a century as the first example in nearly every programming language. As a cultural object it titles songs by Adele and Lionel Richie, a long-running Broadway musical, and film catchphrases from Jerry Maguire to Star Wars.
Greetings vary profoundly across the world. Some languages greet with a fixed formula and others with a question about the other person's state; some use a single word for both hello and goodbye, as Italian ciao, Hawaiian aloha and Hebrew shalom do. Many encode social hierarchy directly, requiring speakers to choose a level of politeness before a word is exchanged. Understanding these conventions — and the etiquette that governs physical contact, order of greeting and digital openings — is central to cross-cultural communication.
This wiki covers the word "hello" and the practice of greeting: its etymology and origins, its pronunciation and grammar, its regional and telephone variants, its uses in computing, its role in social identity and etiquette, and its place in music, film and popular culture.