What is the origin of the greeting "Hello there"?

What is the origin of the greeting “Hello there”?

The greeting “Hello there” is believed to have originated in England in the 18th century. It is thought to have evolved from the word “hallo,” which was used as a shout to attract attention. Over time, “hello” became a common greeting, and the addition of “there” likely served to emphasize the location of the person being addressed. The phrase has since become a popular and informal way to greet someone.

The greeting “Hello there” is not directly derived from specific greetings in other languages. However, it is worth noting that variations of the phrase exist in different languages and cultures.

For example:

Spanish: “Hola allí” or “¡Hola!”
French: “Bonjour là” or “Bonjour!”
Italian: “Ciao là” or “Ciao!”
German: “Hallo dort” or “Hallo!”
Portuguese: “Olá lá” or “Olá!”
Dutch: “Hallo daar” or “Hallo!”
Russian: “Привет там” (Privet tam) or “Привет!” (Privet!)

While these phrases may have similarities to “Hello there,” it is important to note that “Hello there” itself is primarily associated with English-speaking regions.

First, I would like to say hello ☺️ !

Hello was first recorded in the early 1800s, but was originally used to attract attention or express surprise (“Well, hello! What do we have here?”. But the true breakthrough for this now-common word was when it was employed in the service of brand-new technology: the telephone.

Thomas Edison himself claimed to have initiated the use of hello upon receiving a phone call, which required people to address an unseen and unknown person. It was simpler and more efficient than some other greetings used in the early days of the telephone, such as “Do I get you?” and “Are you there?”

Hello obviously caught on and spread along with the telephone. But had the actual inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, had his way, our greetings might be very different today. For his entire life, he preferred to answer the phone with “Ahoy.”

What does it mean when someone says hello there?

It is thought to have evolved from the word “hallo,” which was used as a shout to attract attention. Over time, “hello” became a common greeting, and the addition of “there” likely served to emphasize the location of the person being addressed. The phrase has since become a popular and informal way to greet someone.

Why does General Kenobi say hello there?

During the sequence in the film depicting the Battle of Utapau, Obi-Wan Kenobi ambushes General Grievous, uttering the phrase to surprise his adversary. It was at this instance that the phrase grew in popularity, sparking its use as a popular running gag and internet meme.

What is the origin of the word hello?

You want to greet someone.

You have the following options:

How are you?
I hope you’re doing well!
Hey!
Lo!

The first couple are the ones you’d pick in a conversation you’d already struck up. You’ve met and sat down with Ælfred, so you can start your chat with a Hu eart þu? or a Wes hāl! and hope he continues with an Ic eom wel, þancung, and þu?.

You are, I should mention, an Anglo-Saxon. You are speaking Old English.

But before you can move on to the next stage of your relationship, you must begin by getting Alfred’s attention. A whole sentence would be overkill here. All you need is a single, sharp syllable. Those last two options fit quite neatly.

“Hey!” you shout, which would be He! or Ea! in your Old English; or maybe you opt for La!: “Lo!”. (This last one doesn’t translate well into modern English, because we don’t exactly go around saying “Lo!” anymore, but this isn’t modern English, so it’s also not exactly a concern.)

But Ælfred cannot hear you. He’s old, or something. You want a longer word to get his attention—still just as sharp and syllable-y and as meaningless of a word as “hey” or “lo,” but a little longer. Two syllables, let’s say.

So you do the obvious word-math:

hey + lo = hey-lo (in Old English: eala or hela)

– and you shout: Hela!. Ælfred hears you; it is time for Wes hāl.

And so “hey-lo” (or “hallo,” or “hello,” or whatever the kids nowadays are calling it)—however ridiculous its origin—spread. The vowels between and around the “h” and “ll” varied for a while across almost every possible vowel configuration; “hello,” with the “e” and the “o,” won out because it became the standard greeting of telephone communication.

(Contrary to urban myth, neither Edison nor Bell coined “hello” out of thin air, but, with how silly and straightforward its actual etymology is, I might’ve preferred they had.)

What is the history behind the word hello?

Originally Answered: what is the history behind the word HELLO?

Fake story
People generally fake the story behind “Hello”: when Alexander Graham Bell called his girlfriend for the first time, he said, “hello!”Another version says that his girlfriend’s name was Margaret “Hello.”. So for her, he gave the telephone greeting “Hello.

Reality

Margaret was Graham Bell’s brother’s widow!The credit for coining the term hello goes to Thomas Edison. He expressed his surprise, which was misheard as “Hullo.” Initially, Graham Bell decided on “Ahoy” (as in, really, the ahoy on the ships) as the telephone greeting.But later, Edison wrote to the Central District and Printing Company of Pittsburgh that calling the bell hello! wasn’t required.We very well know how often it’s used!Also, there are various pronunciations for hello, such as Hullo, hallo, holla, hola, halloo, etc.

Who invented the word “hello”?

Let us know this by story.

What do you say when you pick up the phone?
You say “hello,” of course.
What do you say when someone introduces a friend, a relative, or anybody at all?
You say “hello.”
Hello has to have been the standard English language greeting since English people began greeting, no?

Well, here’s a surprise from Ammon Shea, author of The First Telephone Book: Hello is a new word.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of “hello” dates back only to 1827. And it wasn’t mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830’s said hello to attract attention (“Hello, what do you think you’re doing?”) or to express surprise (“Hello, what have we here?”). Hello didn’t become “hi” until the telephone arrived.

The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say “hello” when answering. His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word was “ahoy.”

Ahoy?

“Ahoy,” it turns out, had been around longer—at least 100 years longer—than hello. It too was a greeting, albeit a nautical one, derived from the Dutch “hoi,” meaning “hello.” Bell felt so strongly about “ahoy” that he used it for the rest of his life.

And so, by the way, does the entirely fictional “Monty” Burns, evil owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on The Simpsons. If you watch the program, you may have noticed that Mr. Burns regularly answers his phone “Ahoy-hoy,” a coinage the Urban Dictionary says is properly used “to greet or get the attention of a small sloop-rigged coasting ship.” Mr. Burns, apparently, wasn’t told.

Why did Hello succeed? Aamon points to the telephone book. The first phone books included authoritative How-To sections on their first pages, and “hello” was frequently the officially sanctioned greeting.

In fact, the first phone book ever published, by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 (with 50 subscribers listed), told users to begin their conversations with “a firm and cheery ‘hulloa.'” (I’m guessing the extra “a” is silent.)

What is the origin of the greeting "Hello there"?

Whatever the reason, Hello pushed past Ahoy and never looked back. The same cannot be said of the phonebook’s recommended way to end a Phone conversation. The phonebook recommended: “That is all.”

Says Ammon Shea:

This strikes me as an eminently more honest and forthright way to end a phone call than “good-bye.” “Good-bye,” “bye-bye,” and all the other variants are ultimately contractions of the phrase “God Be with you” (or “with ye”). I don’t know about you, but I don’t really mean to say that when I end a conversation. I suppose I could say “ciao” — which does have a certain etymological background of coming from the Italian schiavo, which means “I am your slave,” and I don’t much want to say that either…

The more Ammon thought about it, the more he liked “That is all.”

For several decades, the great newscaster Walter Cronkite would end his broadcasts by saying, “And that’s the way it is,” a fine turn of phrase that has almost as much pith and truth to it as “That is all.” Broadcast journalist Linda Ellerbee had a similar method of ending her news segments with the trenchant “And so it goes.” These are perfectly serviceable phrases, but even they don’t have the clarity and utility of “That is all.” I should like to see “That is all” make a comeback in colloquial speech, and I have resolved to attempt to adopt it in the few telephone conversations that I engage in.

Well, this probably wasn’t fair or even nice, but I decided to call Ammon Shea to see if he practices what he preaches. He answered his phone with a very standard “hello,” and then, after I’d gotten permission to quote from his book, when it was time to end our conversation, I gave him no hint, no encouragement; I just waited to see how it would go, hoping to hear him say, “That is all.” But no…

He said, “Bye.”

Our illustrations come from the magical pen of Adam Cole, an intern with NPR’s Science Desk, and should anyone wish to place a call to “Monty” Burns in Springfield, be prepared. This is how he will answer the phone.

What is the origin of the word “hi”?

According to my dictionary¹ (and somewhat surprisingly), this is “first recorded in Middle English” (which begs the question of how it was pronounced; likely as “hee”).² This being the case, I suppose it may have been a variant of hey, which is stated to have the same origin. Hey³ is sometimes used instead of hi in the American South, and this may then actually be a conservative feature rather than an innovation.

I had, however, until seeing this, considered the origin of “Hi” as a greeting to be a corruption of How are you? which is a common enough greeting, and the phonological origins of this would be straightforward and plausible:

How are you? |hawaɹjʊw|
Destressing the are and you: How’ ya? |hawjə|
Losing the |w| before the |j|: Hiya |hajə| (And hiya is found as a greeting in many Northern American dialects.)
Losing the schwa: Hi.

Notes:

¹ New Oxford American Dictionary, via the Apple Dictionary application.

² Google’s N-Gram viewer confirms it’s not particularly new, though oddly, the prevalence of the uncapitalized form of the word dropped around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

³ In many other dialects, it is a call for attention, “Hey, look at this,” but not quite a substitute for “Hi!”

How did ‘hello’ come to be a standard greeting? What is the etymology of the word?

According to the OED, all three words originated as cries or exclamations to gain attention or express surprise, exultation, encouragement, or some similar emotion.

”Hey”, from the Middle English hei (which also appears in Dutch and German), is the oldest, with a citation from 1225. ”Hi”, a parallel form to hey, appears from the mid-19th century, with the OED attributing its use as a greeting to North American influences.

”Hello” is a variant of ”hallo”/”hullo”, which has roots in Old High German. Its earliest citations as a greeting (from 1827) are also from U.S. sources.

Although most obviously thought of as a greeting, ”hello” retains its use as an expression of surprise, especially in the context of an unexpected discovery (”Hello, what the hell is this?”), and is also still used to gain attention (”Hello? Is there anybody there?”).

What is the history behind the word hello?

Originally Answered: What is the history behind the word hello?

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of “hello” dates back only to 1827. And it wasn’t mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830’s said hello to attract attention (“Hello, what do you think you’re doing?”), or to express surprise (“Hello, what have we here?”). Hello didn’t become “hi” until the telephone arrived.

The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say “hello” when answering.

What does “Hey there” mean in English?

It can be a greeting, a way of saying hello to someone you know.

“Hey there, Bob. Lookin’ good man. How’re ya’ doing?”

It can also be used to call out or get the attention of someone you don’t know.

“Hey there, watch where you’re going!”

“Hey there, you in the green shirt. What’s your name?”

You can even use it to talk to yourself, evidently.

What is the origin of the American greeting “Hi”?

Since the word evolved orally, it is hard to trace. But it seems reasonable to me that it evolved from the common greeting, “How are you?” Said rapidly and with no real meaning, it could easily have become ha-WA-ya, which might still have meant how are you in the speaker’s mind? But when the wa became melded with the ha, followed by the palatalized ya, it naturally became hiya and hi.

The same evolution happened with How Do You Do? as it became how-d’ya-do, then simply howdy-do and howdy, with the original meaning mostly forgotten.

How did the term “howdy,” meaning hello, come about? When was it first used as an expression of greeting?

I don’t know when it was first used, but the progression seems obvious from the very English ‘how do you do’ through ‘how d’ye do’ or ‘how do’ (or even, as Bernard Shaw has it in ‘Pygmalion’, aajerdo’) to ‘howdy’. Just as ‘how do you do’ is not an actual inquiry as to the other person’s wellbeing, it is a set phrase to which the response is also ‘how do you do’, so ‘howdy’ is not a question; it is a means of greeting someone, and the response should also be ‘howdy’. Modern equivalent? Perhaps ‘hiya’, which may also have evolved from ‘how do you do’?

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How do you do “Hello dear”?

The phrase “Hello dear” is a warm and friendly greeting typically used to address someone with affection or familiarity. It is a common way to greet friends, family members, or loved ones. When using this greeting, it’s important to consider the context and relationship you have with the person you’re addressing. Generally, “Hello dear” is appropriate in casual or informal settings, such as among close friends or family members.

To use “Hello dear” in conversation, simply say or write “Hello dear” followed by the person’s name or a term of endearment if applicable. For example:

“Hello dear, how are you today?”
“Hello, my dear friend! It’s so good to see you.”
“Hello dear, may I have a moment of your time?”

Remember, the appropriateness of using “Hello dear” may vary depending on cultural norms, the nature of your relationship with the person, and the specific context in which it is being used.

How do I respond when a guy texts, “Hello there”?

When responding to a guy who texts you with “Hello there,” you have a variety of options depending on your relationship and the tone you wish to convey. Here are a few possible responses:

Casual and friendly:

“Hey! How’s it going?”
“Hi there! What’s up?”
“Hello! Nice to hear from you.”

Playful or flirty:

“Well, hello there! What mischief are you up to?”
“Hello, handsome! You caught me at the perfect moment.”
“Hey, cutie! Long time no chat. What’s new?”

Polite and professional:

“Hello! How may I assist you today?”
“Hi there. Is there something specific you wanted to discuss?”
“Good day. What can I do for you?”

It’s important to consider the nature of your relationship and the context of the conversation when choosing your response. Select an option that aligns with your comfort level and the dynamic you have with the person. If in doubt, a friendly and polite response is usually a safe choice.

Is it polite to greet with “Hi there” in email correspondence?

Yes, using “Hi there” as a greeting in email correspondence can be considered polite and appropriate in many casual or informal settings. It’s a friendly and informal way to start an email, and it can help to establish a warm and approachable tone.

However, it’s essential to consider the context and the nature of your relationship with the recipient. In more formal or professional settings, it’s generally recommended to use a more conventional and professional greeting, such as “Hello,” “Dear [Recipient’s Name],” or “Good morning/afternoon/evening.”

If you’re unsure about the level of formality required, it’s best to err on the side of caution and choose a more formal greeting. Adapt your greeting based on the recipient, the purpose of the email, and the prevailing norms in your industry or organization.

Remember, maintaining a professional tone in your email communication is crucial, so it’s a good practice to match the formality of your greeting to the level of professionalism expected in the specific context.

How do you respond to “Hi there”?

When someone greets you with “Hi there,” there are several ways you can respond depending on the level of formality and the nature of your relationship. Here are a few possible responses:

1 Informal response:

“Hey! How’s it going?”
“Hi there! What’s up?”
“Hi! Nice to see you.”

2 Neutral response:

“Hello! How can I help you?”
“Hi there! Is there something you need?”
“Hi! What brings you here?”

3 Polite response:

“Hello! It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Hi there! I hope you’re having a great day.”
“Greetings! How may I assist you?”

Remember, the specific response may vary depending on the context of the interaction and your personal style. It’s generally a good idea to match the tone and level of formality of the person who greeted you while being friendly and genuine in your response.

What is the origin of the greeting “Hello”? What does it mean? Are there any similar greetings in other languages?

The word “hello” as a greeting has its origins in the English language. It is believed to have emerged in the 19th century, possibly from a combination of similar expressions like “holla,” “hullo,” and “hallo,” which were used as calls to attract attention or as expressions of surprise. The exact etymology is not entirely clear.

As for the meaning of “hello,” it is primarily used as a friendly and informal greeting to initiate or acknowledge contact with someone. It is a way of expressing recognition and establishing communication.

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Similar greetings exist in other languages, although the specific words used may vary. Here are a few examples:

Spanish: “Hola”
French: “Bonjour”
Italian: “Ciao”
German: “Hallo” or “Guten Tag”
Portuguese: “Olá”
Dutch: “Hallo”
Russian: “Привет” (Privet)
Japanese: “こんにちは” (Konnichiwa)
Chinese: “你好” (Nǐ hǎo)
Hindi: “नमस्ते” (Namaste)

These greetings serve the same purpose as “hello” in English, acting as a friendly salutation to initiate or acknowledge communication. The specific greeting used may depend on the language, cultural norms, and the relationship between the individuals involved.

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Conclusion

The phrase “Hello there” has gained significant cultural recognition due to its use in popular culture, particularly in the Star Wars franchise. In the 2005 film “Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” the character Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Ewan McGregor, utters the phrase “Hello there” in a distinctive manner during a particular scene. This scene has since become a meme and has been widely shared and referenced online.

It’s important to clarify that “Hello there” as a greeting predates its association with Star Wars. The origins of the phrase itself are not well documented, but it is likely a colloquial expression that has been used in English-speaking communities for some time, possibly evolving from older forms of greeting or salutation. Its usage in popular culture has certainly contributed to its widespread recognition and popularity.

Thanks for asking!

What is the origin of the greeting “Hello there”?