Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications in the US as early as the 18 October 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, which came from Old High German "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman". It also connects the development of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla, whose origin is in the French holà. As in addition to hello, halloo, hallo, hollo, hullo and hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.
Telephone
The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo. Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy as a telephone greeting. However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T. B. A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh: By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as 'hello-girls' because of the association between the greeting and the telephone.
Hullo
Hello might be derived from hullo, which the AmericanMerriam-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.
Hallo and hollo
Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo via hollo. 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" literally 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 Englishhalow and suggests: "Perhaps from ah + lo; compare Anglo Saxon ealā". According to the American Heritage Dictionary, hallo is a modification of the obsolete holla, perhaps from Old Frenchhola. The Old English verb, hǽlan, may be the ultimate origin of the word. Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil and other similar words of Germanic origin. Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu (see also "goodbye" which is a contraction of "God be with you".
Students learning a new computer programming language will often begin by writing a "Hello, World!" program, which does nothing but issue the message "Hello, world" to the user. It has been used since the earliest programs, in many computer languages. This tradition was further popularised after being printed in an introductory chapter of the book The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie. The book had reused the following example taken from a 1974 memo by Brian Kernighan at Bell Laboratories:
