Say "hello" to hello

I heard something on the radio yesterday that shocked me. Well, nothing new there, you might say. But this was a quirk of the English language that I was surprised not to have known about before.

Apparently, "hello" - along with variants like "hallo", "hullo", "hulloa", etc - has not always been the standard English language greeting, used by all and sundry. In fact, "hello"as a greeting is something of a late-comer, and was not popularized until Thomas Edison succeeded in making it the default greeting for phone conversations in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. By the 1870s, it featured in the "How To" section of the new phone books, and became officially sanctioned. (Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell preferred the rather nautical "ahoy", and apparently continued to use that throughout his life, even on the phone.)

The word "hello" did exist before this, of course, but it was more of an exclamation than a greeting, a word to attract attention or express surprise, closer to today's "Hey!" than anything else.

All of which made me want to go back to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels, to see how people greeted each other there. Sure enough, the usual greeting was most often "Good morning/afternoon/evening" or just "Good day", or, alternatively, straight into "How do you do?" 

Going back earlier, say in Shakespearean times, a greeting was more likely to be "hail" or a cheery "what ho!" or "well met!", although "good day" and "good morrow" were also common. No "hellos".

Ha! Who knew?

"Goodbye", on the either hand, has been in common use since at least the 16th century, before which "farewell", "Godspeed " or "adieu" were more common.