This greeting is much newer than most people think. The use of hello as a greeting is only as old as the telephone. The first recorded use is from 1883.
It does, however, have earlier origins in other senses. It is a variant of hallo, which dates to 1840 and is a cry of surprise. That in turn is related to halloo, a cry to urge on hunting dogs. Halloo dates to about 1700, but a variant, aloo, appears in Shakespeare's King Lear a century earlier than that.
And there is an even earlier variant, hollo, which dates to at least 1588 when Shakespeare used it in Titus Andronicus. There are also cognates in other Germanic languages.
Hello was not a shoo-in for the telephone greeting either. It competed with several other options, including Alexander Graham Bell's suggestion of Ahoy, but pulled into an early lead and by the end of the 1880s was firmly ensconced.
譯：
Hello 這個問候的歷史比大多數人想象的都要短，它只與電話問世的時間差不多，最早出現在1883年。
但是，它的起源的確還要更早一些，其前身是hallo，可追溯至1840年，那時意爲因受驚而發出的叫喊聲。而hallo則又與halloo有聯繫，Halloo乃指敦促獵狗時的叫聲，其歷史又可上溯至1700年。但是，在更早的一個世紀之前，莎士比亞所著的《李爾王》（King Lear）中就已經出現了另一個變形詞aloo。
更早的變形詞還有hollo，早在1588年莎士比亞就在《泰特斯阿多洛力克斯》（Titus Andronicus）中提及，在日耳曼語言中還有其它的同源詞。
Hello 也並非打電話時的唯一問候用語，同時還有其它的幾種說法，包括亞歷山大格拉赫姆貝爾（Alexander Graham Bell）所提議的“喂” （Ahoy）。但是Hello被使用得較多，到了十九世紀八十年代末期，其用法得以固定。
