Although “Hi!” may be “the quintessential American word,” it turns out that “Hello!” also has a distinctively American history:
The real ancestry of Hello is Halloo and its variants, a shout to get attention. The Oxford English Dictionary has an example from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in 1722: “I halloo, and call to them till I make them hear.” Hello is just a milder form of Halloo. And we say it thanks to the sensational electronic innovation of the 1870s, the telephone, first demonstrated to the public by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. As telephones and telephone exchanges came into commercial use, the question arose: How do you get the operator’s attention? Alexander Graham Bell proposed Ahoy, but Thomas Edison, who set up the first telephone exchanges, had the last word. He wrote to a colleague in 1877, “I don’t think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?” So Hello it was. That was just for telephones, of course, and at first few people had them. But by the end of the 19th century, telephones were everywhere, along with Hello.
The Dish 