Hello

Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications in the U.S. as early as the 18 January 1826 edition of the Norwich Courier of Norwich, Connecticut. Another early use was an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee, which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette. The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s. ==Etymology==

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo, It also connects the development of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla, whose origin is in the French holà (roughly, 'whoa there!', from French là 'there'). As in addition to hello, halloo, hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels. Telephone Before the telephone, verbal greetings often involved a time of day, such as "good morning". When the telephone began connecting people in different time zones, greetings without time gained popularity. Thomas Edison is credited with popularizing hullo as a telephone greeting. In previous decades, hullo had been used as an exclamation of surprise (used early on by Charles Dickens in 1850) and halloo was shouted at ferry boat operators by people who wanted to catch a ride. There is no evidence the greeting caught on. A 1918 novel uses the spelling "Halloa" in the context of telephone conversations. Hullo, hallo, and other spellings Hello might be derived from an older spelling variant, hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a "chiefly British variant of hello", and which was originally used as an exclamation to call attention, an expression of surprise, or a greeting. Hullo is found in publications as early as 1803. The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello. Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa). The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted: Fowler's has it that "hallo" is first recorded "as a shout to call attention" in 1864. It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798: In many Germanic languages, including German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans, "hallo" directly translates into English as "hello". In the case of Dutch, it was used as early as 1797 in a letter from Willem Bilderdijk to his sister-in-law as a remark of astonishment. ''Webster's Dictionary from 1913 traces the etymology of holloa to the Old English halow'' and suggests: "Perhaps from ah + lo; compare Anglo Saxon ealā." According to the American Heritage Dictionary, hallo is a modification of the obsolete holla (stop!), perhaps from Old French hola (ho, ho! + la, there, from Latin illac, that way). ==See also==