Why we say “hello” on the phone
Hello was not the obvious way to answer a telephone. It won out over rivals, including one that Alexander Graham Bell himself preferred.
Hello was not the obvious way to answer a telephone. It won out over rivals, including one that Alexander Graham Bell himself preferred.
Think about how strange it is that nearly everyone, in nearly every English-speaking home, answers a call with the same word. Nobody voted on it. It simply happened, and the story of how is a small lesson in how habits spread.
A word that was already around#
“Hello” did not begin with the telephone. It is an alteration of older calls such as “hallo” and “hollo”, used to catch someone’s attention from a distance. It is recorded in print in the United States by 1826, and by the 1860s it was common in books.
But it was not yet a greeting for meeting someone. People said “good morning” or “how do you do”, and “hello” was closer to a shout across a field.
The problem the telephone created#
The telephone in the 1870s raised a question no one had faced before. When a bell rang and you lifted the receiver, what do you say to a person you cannot see, and who may not even be the one you expected?
Bell’s answer was “ahoy”, a call borrowed from ships. Thomas Edison’s was “hello”. In a letter dated 15 August 1877, Edison proposed “Hello!” to a telegraph company manager in Pittsburgh who was setting up a telephone line. A short, loud word made sense on a crackly line, and it also had no time of day in it, which suited a device that could connect people far apart.
How it spread#
The deciding factor was probably not Edison’s fame but the switchboard. As telephone exchanges opened, operators greeted and connected callers all day long. They were so closely linked with the word that, by the late 1880s, they were commonly called “hello girls”.
Once thousands of people heard the same word each time they picked up, it was the obvious thing to say back. “Ahoy” faded out.
What to take from it#
There was no committee and no rule. A new technology left a gap, one inventor suggested a word, and a large network of people repeated it until it became the default.
That pattern is common. We usually imagine that the way something is done was planned. More often, it is whatever happened to be repeated enough times that nobody questioned it.
Today the word has moved on again. Many people now answer with a name, a “yeah?”, or nothing at all, and on a smartphone screen many do not answer in words. It is a reminder that no greeting is permanent, only popular for a while.