Hello

Hello (also hallo, hillo, hollo and hullo ) is probably the most common greeting in British English, although it seems to be under threat from the American English hi, not least because the latter is also the most common form used for emails.

Written use of hello itself only goes back to the early 1800s, while hi was being used as far back as the 15th century. The greetings hey and ho were in use in the 13th century and all the other spellings of hello, excepting this one, were used as hunting shouts in the 16th century, together with halloo and halloa, and had become standard greetings by the 19th century. 'Hollo! was used by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus (c. 1588), hullo by Dickens in the 1850s and Edison used halloo for the first sound recording on the strip phonograph.

David Crystal cites the hello spelling as an example of technology influencing vocabulary, and that it came to dominate because it was the spelling later used by Edison - although Bell had used ''ahoy!" for his first telephone in 1877.

And as is so often the case, with words having more than one meaning, depending on context, hello itself has come to take on a new one. Since the 1980s, it is also used as an ironic comment, as in ''I mean, hello! Who the hell does he think he is?, a use similar to that of Come on!'', meaning "don't exaggerate".