Why do we say hello on telephone

This spelling i s considered an Americanism, while hullo is a variant that is more commonly seen in Great Britain. A more modern use of the word hello calls into question the common sense or comprehension of the person being addressed. When the telephone was invented, Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to use the word ahoy as a greeting. Supposedly his rival Thomas Edison suggested hello , while Bell stubbornly clung to ahoy , and well—you know which one stuck around.

Interesting trivia: h ello-girls was the name for the central telephone exchange operators. Hi is equivalent to hello, but it is considered a little bit more informal in tone. In fact, it was recorded a lot earlier than hello. Hi developed from the Middle English hy , similar to hey and ha.

Every hello brings with it an inevitable goodbye. Find out why we say goodbye in the first place and the numerous other ways you can bid farewell. It was in that he patented the telephone. Someone just made it up! Because, in fact, there was no need for a greeting. The first call was rather brief:. Watson, come here — I want you. Though we credit Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone whether or not he wass, is still up for debate , a different inventor is credited with coining the typical phone greeting.

Thomas Edison! The same guy who is credited with inventing the light bulb. Yep, I said credited again. It turns out, those who we think of as the best inventors of time are often invention developers with the best PR of all time! I digress. It was expected to be a line of business communication between two parties that was left as an open line.

If the caller wanted the person on the other end of the line to know they would like to speak, some sort of greeting would need to occur. It was Edison who equipped the first telephone exchanges, so he ended up having the last say. According to The New York Times ,. Koenigsberg embarked on a tortuous search five years ago that led him, finally and triumphantly, to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company Archives in lower Manhattan, where he found an unpublished letter by Edison.

Dated Aug. David was preparing to introduce the telephone to that city. On Jan. Stranger is the story that telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell chose hello as a phone greeting because it was the name of his girlfriend, one Margaret Hello. She never existed — Bell developed the telephone while he was engaged to Mabel Hubbard, and she would be his wife until his death in For many land-bound Americans, the nautical ahoy would have been awkward or even unknown.

Hello had been gaining popularity around the country over the preceding 50 years and so would have come more naturally to many. I was standing all by myself in the committee room, reading a vast law book and wondering what it was about, and whether the plaintiff had done so and so, or whether it was the defendant; and which of them they found guilty; and how the mischief they ever knew he was guilty when the words were tangled up so; and noting, with gratification, the references to Perkins v.

Bangs , Mo. This young man had a moustache that dimmed the lightness of his countenance about as your breath dims the brightness of a razor; and he bored down into it with his fingers and gave it a twist which was singularly gratifying to him, considering that no effect was produced upon the moustache by the operation. He then tilted his little soup-dish to the port side of his head with his gloved hand, and said:.

I was just finishing a sentence about Perkins v. What I want to know is, are you, or are you not, the clerk of the Judiciary Committee? He scratched his head in apparent perplexity for a matter of five seconds, and then said, with deliberation and impressive earnestness:. I hope so. Still, being a stranger, you cannot expect me to take more than a passing interest in your future plans. He did not reply.

He seemed worried and annoyed. Presently he started out and said by George!