Origin of Hello

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Jennifer in Atlanta, Georgia.

Welcome, Jennifer.

What’s going on?

Well, I was curious about the welcoming words, a.k.a. hello.

We say hello or hi, or in the South here, we say hey.

It’s taken a little differently if you say hey in Philadelphia or Boston.

So I was thinking about that having moved a lot as a kid,

but I was also wondering about the changes to that greeting over time.

Because my grandmother, who grew up outside of New York City and New Jersey, told me a story when I was young about how her mother or her grandmother would not say hello because it had the word hell in it.

And they, in fact, would say hey-o instead.

And so I was curious to know, A, is that true?

Was it a time sort of thing or a group of people that would do that?

And then that morphed into, well, that’s sort of near hey, which is what we say here often in the South, to say hello.

And how does that all work together?

I have heard people propose, instead of saying hello because of the hell, to say heaven-o.

I’ve heard them say it.

You have?

Yes.

Like, you’ve actually been greeted by people?

Well, no, I’ve heard them say it, like, in a church where they just wouldn’t say hello.

It was a Pentecostal church that I was visiting, yeah.

They said heaven-o.

They wouldn’t say the word hell.

Oh, my goodness.

And you, Martha, talk about growing up in the church, but that wasn’t an issue in your church.

No, no, no.

It wasn’t an issue in the Southern Baptist Church where I grew up.

Unfortunately, hello, the hell in hello has nothing to do with the place where the devil resides.

It’s just a coincidence of spelling that kind of came about because of the oddness of English etymology.

So it’s nothing to do with hell, hell.

Really?

Yeah, no.

Hello comes from some older words.

They’re spelled a variety of different ways, including hallo, H-A-L-L-O, or halloa, H-A-L-L-O-A.

And there’s a variety of these shouts that are used in naval contexts or in hunting, you know, like fox hunting, that sort of thing, or that are used just to get someone’s attention.

We have a huge number of words in the Germanic languages that are surprisingly similar to each other that all look kind of alike and all sound kind of alike and all are spelled kind of alike.

And it’s the same story for hey.

Anybody who knows Swedish knows that hey is a fairly standard greeting in Swedish.

H-E-J.

Really?

And it looks a lot like our hey, and it sounds like our hey, and it’s related perhaps a thousand or more years back.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

So we have a ton of these.

And all of these words like ho and oi and yo and a lot of these, you can see the similarities here.

A lot of them, they don’t have hard consonants in them, right?

A lot of them are really easy to say, and they’re very easy to shout.

Hi.

Howdy.

Well, howdy is short for how do you do.

And they’re all breath exhalations, too.

Right.

They’re literally exclamations, right?

We exclaim them with our full force of our lungs, or we can if we wish.

Yeah.

I’m thinking of Spanish, too, which the word starts with an H, although it’s hola.

You don’t pronounce the H.

Mm—

Interesting.

Pretty cool, right?

Yeah.

Well, always.

Well, thank you all very much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling, Jennifer.

Y’all take care.

Bye.

Okay.

You too, Jennifer.

So yeah, the hey and hi, that kind of utterance exists in very similar forms in dozens of languages across the world.

And they’re not etymologically connected necessarily.

Some of them may be, but most of them are independently derived because it’s a natural sound for a human to make.

For me, hey is really warm.

I’ve heard people say, you know, it’s not so warm elsewhere, but I find it really warm.

Hey.

Oh, I meant to ask Jennifer about that where somebody thought it was kind of rude.

It’s a thing you say when somebody offends you, like, hey, you’re stepping on my toes.

Hey, that’s my seat.

Yeah, no, I think that is really warm.

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