The History of "Hello": How Thomas Edison and the Telephone Changed English Greetings

Have you ever wondered about the origin of the word "hello"? In this episode of pplpod, we dive deep into the fascinating etymology of "hello" and its surprising evolution. Believe it or not, this ubiquitous English language greeting is relatively modern, first appearing in print in an 1826 edition of the Norwich Courier.

We explore a famous quirk of telephone history, where inventor Alexander Graham Bell initially wanted callers to answer the phone with the nautical term "ahoy ahoy". However, it was Thomas Edison who successfully popularized "hello" as the standard telephone greeting in 1877, largely because a greeting without a specific time of day was needed to connect people across different time zones. Edison's influence was so strong that by 1889, central telephone exchange operators were widely known as "hello-girls".

Join us as we trace the word's roots back to the Old High German terms used to hail ferrymen, the French exclamation "holà" ("whoa there!"), and the loud hunting shouts of "hollo". Whether you spell it hullo, hallo, or hello, this episode is packed with trivia about how the history of the telephone forever changed human communication. Tune in to discover the true history of hello!