Greeting
Greeting is an act of communication in which people intentionally make their presence known to one another, showing attention and signalling a relationship that is usually cordial[^c1]. Greetings exist in all known human cultures[^c2], though their customs are highly culture- and situation-specific: a greeting may be spoken, gestural, written, or a combination of these, and the same word or gesture may serve both for meeting and for parting.
The best-known English greetings are surprisingly recent. "Hello" is first attested in writing from 1826[^c3], and its monosyllabic rival "hi" became popular only in the 1920s[^c4]. Gestural greetings are far older: the Western handshake can be traced to Greece in the 5th century BC, where it served as a gesture of peace showing that the hand held no weapon[^c5], while bows, curtsies, palm-together salutes, and nose-presses developed in cultures around the world. The modern telephone greeting emerged from a nineteenth-century contest of words, settled when Edison proposed "Hello" in a letter of 15 August 1877[^c6].
Greetings are studied as a form of phatic communion — communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships[^c7] — and they are governed by etiquette, which fixes what counts as polite, familiar, or rude in a given setting. Their history is one of recurring controversy: over the vulgarity of "hello", over the informality of "hi" in email, over the persistence of a false etymology linking the word to Bell's supposed fiancée, and over whether contact greetings should survive in an era of epidemic disease. Research has also begun to quantify greeting's effects: a cross-cultural study of bowing found that the gesture raised perceived attractiveness among Japanese raters but had little or no effect among American ones[^c11], and a study spanning nationally representative Turkish and large English-speaking samples found that greeting and thanking weak ties predicted greater life satisfaction[^c13].
Greetings are applied in practice — in email salutations, cross-cultural and professional encounters, language teaching, and public ritual — and they carry symbolic weight, as in World Hello Day, observed every 21 November to express that conflicts should be resolved through communication rather than the use of force[^c8]. The 2020s brought a widely reported generational decline in the telephone greeting, with young people increasingly answering calls with "Hi", "What's up?" or "Yeah?" instead of "hello"[^c12], and a growing emphasis on consent in contact greetings, since with increasing awareness of the MeToo movement, consent — such as asking "would you like a hug?" — is treated as part of modern manners[^c19]. Contemporary guidance in multicultural settings advises choosing the least presumptive option that still acknowledges the other person[^c18], with non-contact forms such as the hand on the heart or the namaste offered alongside the handshake.
Institutional and cultural settings show the same negotiation of form and rank. In June 2026 the Kathmandu Valley Traffic Police directed officers to greet the public with the traditional namaste and not to shake hands on duty[^c15], while a Kazakh street survey found broad agreement that embraces belong to close relationships and that the handshake is the neutral option in public[^c16]. Forms of address remain contested: a 2026 viral episode in which a Nigerian graduate addressed a senior banker by his first name renewed debate about deference, the banker replying that she could call him Mr Elumelu, TOE or Chairman, but not Tony[^c17]. A parallel dispute in South Korea asked whether a junior must keep greeting a senior who never reciprocates, with some arguing that a junior should greet regardless[^c20]. The topic is not confined to human society: ethologists study ritualised greeting exchanges in other animals, which serve chiefly to maintain social bonds and cooperation rather than to defuse aggression after conflict[^c9][^c10], a body of work surveyed under [[Animal Greeting Behaviour]].
Greeting has also extended to machine interlocutors. Customer-service chatbots open conversations with scripted greetings, and designers increasingly personalise those openings — among the most common and tangible personalization strategies is addressing consumers by name, whereby the employee greets or replies to the customer using their name[^c21] — a field examined under [[Digital Greetings]]. The greeting word retains cultural currency beyond the exchange itself: on 1 September 2026 Apple's new chief executive introduced himself with the single word "hello"[^c22], while the singer LISA released a single whose title takes its title from the stylized "sawatdee ka," the Thai greeting for "hello," paying homage to her home country of Thailand[^c23].