So, I want you to try a little experiment with
me. Yeah, I'm game. Well, I mean, you and the
listener. It's going to sound really simple,
but just stick with me. Think about the very
first word you spoke today. Or, you know, if
you haven't spoken to anyone yet, think about
the first word you said the last time your phone
rang. Right. I'm willing to bet pretty good money
that the word was hello. Yeah, that is a very
safe bet. I mean, it is the absolute default
setting for human interaction in the English
language. It really is. It's so mundane, so incredibly
common that it feels like it's just part of our
DNA at this point. Like, didn't the Romans say
hello? Didn't cavemen grunt something that sounded
vaguely like hello? It just feels ancient. It
certainly feels fundamental. It's the linguistic
equivalent of a handshake. You don't even think
about it before you do it. But... And this is
exactly why I love the stack of research we have
for today's deep dive. That feeling is a total
lie. Completely fabricated by history. Yeah.
We have been digging through these etymological
dictionaries, historical letters, and some very
dusty archives. And they tell a completely different
story. This isn't a story about a polite greeting
that survived the ages. This is actually a story
about cutting -edge technology, a really fierce
rivalry between two massive egos, and a word
that honestly didn't really exist until five
minutes ago in historical terms. And that is
the mission for our Deem Dive today. We are going
to completely debunk the assumption that hello
is ancient. The reality is, if you hopped in
a time machine and went back to, say, the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, nobody would
know what you were saying. Which is crazy. The
modern use of the word hello is actually younger
than the United States. Which is just wild to
consider. But to hook you in even further, listener,
there is this bizarre alternative reality lurking
in these documents. If history had gone just
a little bit differently, like if one specific
inventor had been a better marketer than the
other, we wouldn't be saying hello at all. No,
we wouldn't. We would all be answering our smartphones
by shouting a nautical term used by pirates.
It sounds like a joke. But it was very nearly
the standard. We came razor close to living in
a world where every serious business call started
with ahoy. So let's unpack this. I want to start
with the timeline because this really threw me
off when I first saw the notes. I'm looking at
this and you're telling me that hello spelled
H -E -L -L -O is not an old word. Not in the
way we use it and certainly not with that spelling.
If you look at the written record, hello is surprisingly
modern. The very first time we see it attested
in writing spelled exactly that way is in 1826.
1826. Wow. OK, let's put that into context. Beethoven
was still alive in 1826. Right. John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson had literally just died. The
steam locomotive was brand new, but the word
hello was just being born. Precisely. It appeared
in an edition of the Norwich Courier. That was
a newspaper out of Norwich, Connecticut, on October
18th, 1826. Before that exact moment, you just
don't see it. You see cousins of the word, which
we'll get to later, but the specific H -E -L
-L -O spelling was virtually non -existent. So
it pops up in a newspaper in Connecticut. Does
it take off immediately? Is it like a viral trend
from the 1800s? It's more of a slow burn. It
starts to trickle into the American lexicon.
By 1833, it shows up in a book called The Sketches
and Eccentricities of Curd David Crockett of
West Tennessee. Davy Crockett. Okay, so it's
getting some real pop culture traction in the
1830s. Right. And by the 1860s, it becomes much
more common in literature. But... And this is
a really crucial distinction we need to make.
When people in the mid -19th century used the
word hello, they were not being polite. They
weren't walking up to a friend on the street,
tipping their hat and saying, oh, hello, nice
to see you. Wait, so if I'm walking down a street
in London or New York in 1850 and I see a buddy
and I say hello, he's going to look at me weird.
He might actually be offended or at least startled.
Back then, hello wasn't a greeting. It was an
exclamation of surprise or a way to forcefully
call attention to something. Like a warning.
Exactly. Imagine you're walking down the street
and you see someone drop their wallet or you
see a horse about to run into a busy crowd. You
might yell, hello, watch out. Oh, I see. It's
forceful. It's an interruption. Yes, it's an
interjection. It basically says, hey, you. Or
what's this? It wasn't a warm, fuzzy opener to
a conversation. If you wanted to greet someone
back then, you'd use time -specific phrases.
Like, good morning. Right. Good morning, good
afternoon, or how do you do? That is such a funny
shift to wrap your head around. We use it now
to gently start a connection, to sort of open
the door. But it started as a way to basically
yell at people to pay attention. And if we dig
into the etymology provided by the Oxford English
Dictionary, the aggression really makes sense.
Hello is essentially an alteration of older words
like hallo or hollow. And those actually trace
back to old high German words like halla or holla.
And what did those mean? They were imperative
commands. Specifically, they were used to hail
a ferryman. A ferryman? Like across a river?
Picture the scene. You're in medieval Europe.
You're standing on the bank of a foggy river.
The boat is on the other side. You don't have
a flare gun. You don't have a phone. You just
have your lungs. You cup your hands and you scream,
holla! You were literally shouting at a boat
driver to come pick you up. Fetch me! I love
that image. So the root of our most polite, civilized
greeting is basically screaming at a guy to get
his boat over here. It goes even deeper. There's
also a strong connection to the French word hola.
If you break that down, it comes from hol, plus
la, which means there. Oh, hol there. Roughly
translated, it means... Whoa there or stop. It
was used to stop horses from running or to stop
a physical fight in the street. OK, so let's
recap the resume of this word so far. We have
a word that evolved from shouting at ferrymen,
telling runaway horses to stop moving or expressing
shock that someone dropped their wallet. It's
loud, it's rude and it's entirely functional.
Correct. And somehow this rough around the edges
shout became the universal way to say hi. How
on earth did that transition happen? Because
usually language tries to become more polite
over time, not less. This brings us to the real
pivot point of our story. The catalyst that changed
this specific piece of language forever wasn't
a poet or a king or a social movement. It was
a machine. The telephone. The telephone revolution.
You have to understand the psychological shift
the telephone caused. Think about how people
greeted each other before the phone existed.
You had visual cues. Sure. You saw someone approaching.
Exactly. You knew it was morning or evening.
You'd bow. You'd smile. You'd shake hands. You
had context. Right. Communication was embodied.
You were physically there. But the telephone
completely broke that. It severed the voice from
the body. It connected people across time zones,
potentially. But more importantly, it removed
the visual component entirely. When that bell
rang, you didn't know who was there. That must
have been terrifying at first. It was. You didn't
know if it was your boss, your wife, or a complete
stranger. And you didn't know when they were.
It created this moment of blindness. Exactly.
A social blindness. You couldn't just launch
into conversation because you didn't even know
if the connection was live yet. You needed a
handshake signal, a sonic handshake, to verify
the channel was open before you started talking.
And this is where the rivalry kicks in. Because
we had two titans of invention who completely
disagreed on how we should handle this new awkwardness.
We have Alexander Graham Bell, the man who actually
invented the thing, and Thomas Edison, the wizard
of Menlo Park. And they were effectively fighting
a war over user interface design. That's a really
great way to frame it. It was a 19th century
UI battle. Alexander Graham Bell, the father
of the telephone, had a very specific idea for
this. He was a bit of a traditionalist, perhaps,
or maybe just heavily influenced by that nautical
history we mentioned. He felt the proper way
to answer the phone to establish that invisible
link was to say, Ahoy! Ahoy. Ahoy, ahoy. I really
want everyone listening to try saying that out
loud right now. Ahoy, ahoy. It feels so jaunty.
It does. It feels like you're about to hoist
a sail. I'm just imagining a high -powered Wall
Street business executive in the 1980s picking
up a massive brick phone and barking, ahoy, ahoy,
sell all my stocks. It changes the entire vibe
of the 20th century. It sounds totally ridiculous
to us now, but Bell was deadly serious about
this. He used ahoy for the rest of his life.
He never gave it up. He refused to switch. He
borrowed it from the ships, just like that old
ferryman connection. For him, the telephone was
quite literally a line tossed across a distance,
so Ahoy made perfect logical sense. So Bell's
firmly on Team Ahoy. But obviously, we don't
say that today. If I answered the phone with
Ahoy, people would think I was having a stroke
or playing a weird prank. So Edison must have
had a different plan. Edison championed Hello.
And we actually have the receipts on this. There
is a specific letter preserved in the archives
that pinpoints the exact moment Hello won the
war. It's from Thomas Edison to a man named TBA
David. And who is TBA David? He was the president
of the Central District and Printing Telegraph
Company in Pittsburgh. Basically, a guy running
the infrastructure. The letter is dated August
15, 1877. August 1877. So the telephone is an
absolute baby. It's barely out of the lab. What
does Edison say to him in this letter? It's fascinating
because it's so incredibly practical. Edison
isn't talking about social niceties at all. He's
in consulting an etiquette book. He's talking
about technical specs. He writes, Friend David,
I do not think we shall need a call bell, as
hello can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. Wait,
I want to linger on that for a second. I do not
think we shall need a call bell. He's trying
to get rid of a piece of hardware. Right. Early
phones are clunky and complicated. The big question
was, how do you even know someone is trying to
talk to you? Do you install a separate expensive
mechanical bell system to ring on the other end?
Like a literal bell. Yes. But Edison, ever the
pragmatist, argued that the word hello was distinct
enough and sharp enough that if you just shouted
it into the receiver, the person on the other
end would hear it loud and clear without needing
extra hardware. So hello didn't win because it
was polite. It won because it was loud. Essentially,
yes. It cuts through the static. Think about
the acoustics of the two words. Ahoy is a bit
soft. It has those round, rolling vowels. Hello
has that sharp H to start the breath, and then
the resonant O at the end. It pierces. It was
a technical decision based purely on volume and
clarity. That is classic Edison. It's not about
the romance of the sea. It's just about the efficiency
of the machine. And typical Edison. He included
a postscript in that letter. about the cost of
course he did what was the bottom line he noted
that the cost to manufacture the sender and receiver
was only seven dollars by using hello instead
of a complex signaling bill system he was keeping
the device incredibly simple and cheap that is
unbelievable we say hello to our grandmothers
to our spouses to our children because thomas
addison wanted to save seven bucks on a bell
in 1877. in a way yes And because of Edison's
massive influence and the fact that his telephone
systems became the commercial standard, the word
traveled with the technology. It was literally
bundled with the hardware. It really did spread
like a virus then. It went from zero to hero
overnight. The speed was staggering. By 1880,
which is just three years after that letter to
TVA David, there was a major telephone operators
convention in Niagara Falls. And guess what was
printed on all their name tags? Let me guess.
It wasn't ahoy. It was the word hello. It had
already become the official badge of the industry,
and by 1889, the operators at the central exchanges,
who were mostly women connecting the lines manually,
became colloquially known as Hello girls. Hello
girls. So the word became inextricably linked
to the device itself. You couldn't have one without
the other. It's almost like the word Google today.
It's a brand name that just became a verb for
everyone. Exactly. Before the phone, you shouted
hello at a wolf or a fairy. After the phone,
you said hello to your neighbor. The technology
completely recontextualized the word. It stripped
away the aggression over time and left only the
utility. Now we want to pivot a bit here because
while hello won the war, it wasn't the only spelling
up. there. When I'm reading old British novels
or even just looking at older texts in general,
I feel like I see it spelled differently all
the time. It's not always H -E -L -L -O. No,
it isn't, and this speaks to the deep etymology
of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary actually
notes that because the word is derived from these
shouts and hollers, it wasn't standardized for
a very long time. It can actually be spelled
with all five vowels. Wait, all of them? A -E
-I -O -U? Yes. Hello, hello, hello, and hello.
Hello. That sounds like something a cartoon character
would say. It's definitely rare, but it's in
the record. Hello with a U is probably the one
you recognize most from literature, though. It's
listed as a chiefly British variant. Right, I
can totally hear it in a British accent. Hello,
what's this then? It sounds a bit bewildered.
Exactly. It appears in print as early as 1803.
Charles Dickens used hello in 1850, and again
it was used as an exclamation of surprise. But
then you have the older variants like hollow
and halloo, and these are where the word really
shows its teeth. This goes back to the hunting
tradition, right? Correct. Hollow was originally
shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted.
It's a sudden burst of sound meant to trigger
adrenaline. It's a signal to the dogs and the
other hunters that the chase is on. I think we
have a Shakespeare quote about this in the notes,
don't we? We do. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare writes,
Hello me like a hare. Hello me like a hare. So
he's saying, shout at me like you're hunting
a rabbit. That is visceral. That is definitely
not a friendly high. It's violent. It implies
being targeted. And Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
in The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, which was
written way back in 1798, uses hollow. in a very
similar desperate way oh that's a classic water
water everywhere right and in that poem there's
a line that goes nor any day for food or play
came to the mariners hollow oof okay so think
about the context there they are stuck at sea
they are dying of thirst they are shouting hollow
at a bird or at a passing ship in the distance
it's a guttural cry for help it's haunting It
is the exact opposite of a teary, hello, how
are you today? It's a pure survival mechanism.
It's really interesting to see how these literary
giants use the word as a tool for action. You
know, hunting, sailing, shouting, rather than
just casual conversation. It really drives home
the point that this word has energy. It's kinetic.
And we shouldn't ignore the global connection
here either. The Germanic languages have a very
similar lineage. In German, Danish, and Dutch,
hello translates directly to hello. Is it just
a direct translation or is the actual history
similar? The history is very similar. In Dutch,
for example, we found a letter from 1797 where
hello is used as an expression of astonishment.
So across this whole family of languages, you
have this basic sound, this H -L -O structure.
being used to mark surprise or to grab attention.
It really emphasizes that Edison didn't invent
the sound out of thin air. He just repurposed
it. He took a word that meant, hey, look at me,
or stop what you're doing, and turned it into,
I am here on the line. He operationalized it.
That is the key takeaway from all these sources
for me. If we look at the big picture, hello
is a perfect example of adaptive reuse in language.
It's like turning a sword into a plowshare, but
linguistically. Precisely. It started as a functional
shout to stop horses or to hail fairies. It was
rough. It was loud. Then the telephone arrives.
It creates a brand new social problem, which
is blindness in communication. Edison sees that
this loud, rough word is the perfect technical
solution to that exact problem. And because the
text scaled, the word scaled with it. And it
softened. Yeah. Over the last 150 years, Hullo
slowly lost its aggressive edge. It stopped being
a shout and became a welcome. It became the most
neutral, safe way to acknowledge another human
being on the planet. It's actually a pretty beautiful
evolution. It's amazing to think that we completely
changed how we speak because of a physical device
invented in the 19th century. We like to think
language is this organic thing that just flows
from our souls, but sometimes it's just determined
by the hardware we are using. We speak the way
our machines require us to speak. Absolutely.
The medium dictates the message, or at least
the greeting. The physical constraints of the
early telephone, the static on the line, the
lack of a bell shaped, the first word of our
conversations for an entire century. So as we
wrap up this deep dive today, I just keep going
back to that image of Alexander Graham Bell.
The man invented the telephone. He changed the
world. But he couldn't get us to say ahoy. It's
a great reminder that being the inventor doesn't
mean you actually control the culture. Edison
understood the user experience. Even if his motivation
was just saving money on a mechanical bell, much
better than Bell did. Hello was easier. It worked
better. It solved the problem. So here is a thought
for you to chew on as you go about your day.
Next time your phone rings or you jump on a Zoom
call and you instinctively say hello, remember
that you are effectively shouting at a ferryman
to come pick you up across a foggy river. And
remember that you are actively participating
in a linguistic habit that was designed purely
to save $7 in 1877. But here's the real provocative
question I want to leave you with. We've been
talking this whole time about how the telephone
brought back an old command word to solve a tech
problem. Look at what's happening right now with
AI. How do you wake up your digital assistant?
You say, hey, Siri, or Alexa. Exactly. Hey, Alexa.
We aren't greeting them nicely. We are commanding
them. We are right back on the riverbank shouting
at the ferryman, hey, do this. That is a fascinating
parallel. We stripped the politeness right back
out of it because we were talking to machines
again. If Alexander Graham Bell had been just
a little bit more persuasive, maybe we'd be saying
ahoy Siri today. But we aren't. We are still
stuck in that loop of shouting to get attention.
So what technology is being invented right now
that will change the words we use 10 years from
now? That is the question. The dictionary is
always being rewritten by the devices in our
pockets. Definitely something to think about.
Thanks for listening to this deep dive into the
surprising history of hello. Goodbye. Or as Bell
would say, ahoy.