Hello the first word

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«Hello!» redirects here. For the British magazine, see Hello! (magazine).

Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826.^[1]

Early uses

Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications in the U.S. as early as the 18 October 1826 edition of the Norwich Courier of Norwich, Connecticut.^[1] Another early use was an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee,^[2] which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette.^[3] The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.^[4]

Etymology

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo,^[1] which came from Old High German «halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman».^[5] It also connects the development of hello to the influence of an earlier form, holla, whose origin is in the French holà (roughly, ‘whoa there!’, from French là ‘there’).^[6] As in addition to hello, halloo,^[7] hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.^[8][9][10]

Telephone

The use of hello as a telephone greeting has been credited to Thomas Edison; according to one source, he expressed his surprise with a misheard Hullo.^[11] Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting.^[12][13] However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T. B. A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh:

Friend David, I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.
What you think? Edison – P.S. first cost of sender & receiver to manufacture is only $7.00.^[11]

By 1889, central telephone exchange operators were known as ‘hello-girls’ because of the association between the greeting and the telephone.^[13][14]

A 1918 fiction novel uses the spelling «Halloa» in the context of telephone conversations.^[15]

Hullo, hallo, and other spellings

Hello might be derived from an older spelling variant, hullo, which the American Merriam-Webster dictionary describes as a «chiefly British variant of hello»,^[16] and which was originally used as an exclamation to call attention, an expression of surprise, or a greeting. Hullo is found in publications as early as 1803.^[17] The word hullo is still in use, with the meaning hello.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa).^[22] The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted:^[23][24]

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.

Fowler’s has it that «hallo» is first recorded «as a shout to call attention» in 1864.^[25]
It is used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written in 1798:

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,

Nor any day for food or play

Came to the mariners’ hollo!

In many Germanic languages, including German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch and Afrikaans, «hallo» literally translates into English as «hello». In the case of Dutch, it was used as early as 1797 in a letter from Willem Bilderdijk to his sister-in-law as a remark of astonishment.^[26]

Webster’s dictionary from 1913 traces the etymology of holloa to the Old English halow and suggests: «Perhaps from ah + lo; compare Anglo Saxon ealā».

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, hallo is a modification of the obsolete holla (stop!), perhaps from Old French hola (ho, ho! + la, there, from Latin illac, that way).^[27]

The Old English verb, hǽlan (1. wv/t1b 1 to heal, cure, save; greet, salute; gehǽl! Hosanna!), may be the ultimate origin of the word.^[28] Hǽlan is likely a cognate of German Heil (meaning complete for things and healthy for beings) and other similar words of Germanic origin. Bill Bryson asserts in his book Mother Tongue that «hello» comes from Old English hál béo þu («Hale be thou», or «whole be thou», meaning a wish for good health; cf. «goodbye» which is a contraction of «God be with ye»).

«Hello, World» computer program

Students learning a new computer programming language will often begin by writing a «Hello, World!» program, which does nothing but issue the message «Hello, world» to the user (such as by displaying it on a screen). It has been used since the earliest programs, in many computer languages. This tradition was further popularised after being printed in an introductory chapter of the book The C Programming Language by Kernighan & Ritchie.^[29] The book had reused an example taken from a 1974 memo by Brian Kernighan at Bell Laboratories.^[30]

See also

• Aloha
• As-salamu alaykum
• Ciao
• Kia ora
• Namaste
• Shalom
• World Hello Day

References

External links

• Hello in more than 800 languages
• OED online entry for hollo (Subscription)
• Merriam-Webster Dictionary: hollo, hullo

It may be true that OK is the most spoken word on the planet, but hello is a good candidate for the English word that most people learn first. The word is so ubiquitous that it’s surprising how new it is: hello has only been in use for about the last 150 years of the 1000-year history of English.

An older term used for greeting or salutation is hail, which dates back to the Middle Ages but was still in use in Shakespeare’s time; he used it both as a greeting (“Hail to your grace“) and as an acclamation (“Hail, Caesar!”). Interestingly, this word is related to others that originally meant “health,” such as hale, health, and whole. Since hail was presumably sometimes shouted (from a horse, across a river, from a tower), it isn’t surprising that several variants are recorded, including hollo, hallo, and halloa. Another variant of this interjection has subsequently had a long life as a noun and verb: holler.

Hello is first recorded in the early 1800s, but was originally used to attract attention or express surprise (“Well, hello! What do we have here?”). But the true breakthrough for this now-common word was when it was employed in the service of brand-new technology: the telephone. Thomas Edison himself claimed to have initiated the use of hello upon receiving a phone call—which required people to address an unseen and unknown person. It was simpler and more efficient than some other greetings used in the early days of the telephone, such as “Do I get you?” and “Are you there?”

Hello obviously caught on, and spread along with the telephone. But had the actual inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, had his way, our greetings might be very different today. For his entire life, he preferred to answer the phone with “Ahoy.”

What do you say when you pick up the phone?
You say «hello,» of course.
What do you say when someone introduces a friend, a relative, anybody at all?
You say «hello.»
Hello has to have been the standard English language greeting since English people began greeting, no?

Well, here’s a surprise from Ammon Shea, author of The First Telephone Book: Hello is a new word.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of «hello» goes back only to 1827. And it wasn’t mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830’s said hello to attract attention («Hello, what do you think you’re doing?»), or to express surprise («Hello, what have we here?»). Hello didn’t become «hi» until the telephone arrived.

The dictionary says it was Thomas Edison who put hello into common usage. He urged the people who used his phone to say «hello» when answering. His rival, Alexander Graham Bell, thought the better word was «ahoy.»

Ahoy?

«Ahoy,» it turns out, had been around longer — at least 100 years longer — than hello. It too was a greeting, albeit a nautical one, derived from the Dutch «hoi,» meaning «hello.» Bell felt so strongly about «ahoy» he used it for the rest of his life.

And so, by the way, does the entirely fictional «Monty» Burns, evil owner of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on The Simpsons. If you watch the program, you may have noticed that Mr. Burns regularly answers his phone «Ahoy-hoy,» a coinage the Urban Dictionary says is properly used «to greet or get the attention of small sloop-rigged coasting ship.» Mr. Burns, apparently, wasn’t told.

Why did hello succeed? Aamon points to the telephone book. The first phone books included authoritative How To sections on their first pages and «hello» was frequently the officially sanctioned greeting.

In fact, the first phone book ever published, by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 (with 50 subscribers listed) told users to begin their conversations with «a firm and cheery ‘hulloa.'» (I’m guessing the extra «a» is silent.)

Whatever the reason, hello pushed past ahoy and never looked back. The same cannot be said of the phonebook’s recommended Way To End A Phone Conversation. The phonebook recommended: «That is all.»

Says Ammon Shea:

This strikes me as an eminently more honest and forthright way to end a phone call than «good-bye.» «Good-bye,» «bye-bye,» and all the other variants are ultimately contractions of the phrase «God Be with you» (or «with ye»). I don’t know about you, but I don’t really mean to say that when I end a conversation. I suppose I could say «ciao» — which does have a certain etymological background of coming from the Italian schiavo, which means «I am your slave,» and I don’t much want to say that either…

The more Ammon thought about it, the more he liked «That is all.»

…For several decades the great newscaster Walter Cronkite would end his broadcasts by saying «And that’s the way it is,» a fine turn of phrase that has almost as much pith and truth to it as «That is all.» Broadcast journalist Linda Ellerbee had a similar method of ending her news segments, with the trenchant «And so it goes.» These are perfectly serviceable phrases, but even they don’t have the clarity and utility of «That is all.» I should like to see «That is all» make a comeback in colloquial speech, and I have resolved to attempt to adopt it in the few telephone conversations that I engage in.

Well, this probably wasn’t fair or even nice, but I decided to call Ammon Shea to see if he practices what he preaches. He answered his phone with a very standard «hello» and then, after I’d gotten permission to quote from his book, when it was time to end our conversation, I gave him no hint, no encouragement, I just waited to see how it would go…hoping to hear him do his «That is all.» But no…

He said, «bye.»

Ammon Shea’s new book (Perigee/Penguin 2010) is called The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everybody Uses But No One Reads.

Our illustrations come from the magical pen of Adam Cole, intern with NPR’s Science Desk, and should anyone wish to place a call to «Monty» Burns in Springfield, be prepared. This is how he will answer the phone.

CheckiO is a coding game for beginners and advanced programmers. Use Python and JavaScript to solve difficult challenges and interesting tasks to improve your coding skills. Portal: https://checkio.org/, this blog mainly records itself Do the problem thinking and implement the code when going through the level, and also learn to learn the code written by other great gods.

Title description

【First Word】: Given a string, find the first word in it (the word is not a letter), the input string may contain dots and commas, the string may start with letters, dots, or spaces, and the words may contain apostrophes.

【link】：https://py.checkio.org/zh-hans/mission/first-word/

【Enter】: String

【Output】: String

【premise】: The original string may contain uppercase and lowercase letters, spaces, commas, and dots (.) And apostrophe ('）

【example】：

first_word("Hello world") == "Hello"
first_word("greetings, friends") == "greetings"

In this question, the given string contains only. , ' Three symbols while encountering' No need to deal with it, so it can be used directlyreplace() Method, will. with , Replace it with a space, then use the space as a delimiter to slice the string, and finally return the first element.

Code

def first_word(text: str) -> str:
    """
        returns the first word in a given text.
    """
    # your code here
    return text.replace(',',' ').replace('.',' ').split( )[0]


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print("Example:")
    print(first_word("Hello world"))
    
    # These "asserts" are used for self-checking and not for an auto-testing
    assert first_word("Hello world") == "Hello"
    assert first_word(" a word ") == "a"
    assert first_word("don't touch it") == "don't"
    assert first_word("greetings, friends") == "greetings"
    assert first_word("... and so on ...") == "and"
    assert first_word("hi") == "hi"
    assert first_word("Hello.World") == "Hello"
    print("Coding complete? Click 'Check' to earn cool rewards!")

Great God Answer

Great God Answer NO.1

def first_word(text: str) -> str:
    import re
    a = re.split("[^a-zA-Z']",text)
    output =""
    for i in a:
        output += i
        if output != "":
            return(output)

Great God Answer NO.2

def first_word(text: str) -> str:
    i=0
    j=0
    while i < len(text) and text[i].isalpha() == False:
           i+=1
    text1=text[i:]
    while j < len(text1) and text1[j]!='.' and text1[j]!=',' :
               j += 1
    s = text1[:j].split(' ')
    return s[0]

Great God Answer NO.3

import re

def first_word(text: str) -> str:
    return re.findall(r"[A-Za-z']+", text)[0]