History Of Hello

Here's an interesting little linquistic tidbit: If you walked up to George Washington back in the day and said, "Hello." George would have looked at you and said, "Huh-what?"

The word "hello" was first used in 1827, and then it was only used the way that we use "hey!" at the beginning of a sentence... to get attention, or like "whoa!" as an expression of surprise.

Hello only gained popularity due to Thomas Edison, who encouraged it's use when picking up the telephone.

(Goodbye is much older, dating back to just before 1600. It started off spelled as godbwye... "god be with ye".)