"Hello" - The true story

I was swept off my feet when i read this

“Hello' is the name of Alexander Graham Bell's girlfriend. His girlfriend was Margaret Hello. And that is how the name came about. It further went on to state that people might have forgotten about the inventor of the telephone but not his girlfriend's name.”

But the above story is not true below explains how the word ‘hello' emanated.

Hello is a salutation or greeting in English language. History has it that Thomas Alva Edison was the first to say hello over the telephone. But Edison didn't invent 'hello' by a long shot. As a matter of fact, the greeting has been around for centuries much before the invention of telephone in 1885.

In ancient times, people greeted each other with 'hallow', which may have come from the Old French word 'hola', meaning 'stop!' or 'whoa'. Even Noah Webster's dictionary included 'hello' in 1883.

By the time the telephone came along, the Americans were saying 'hullo' to each other every day, so it was a short jump to 'hello'. But it wasn't until the telephone was invented that 'hello' emerged as a universal form of greeting and as a way of establishing contact.

So, Edison made hello a popular greeting and an integral part of our lives. Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone in 1885, never liked 'hello' and advocated the use of 'ahoy' as a telephonic greeting.