Hallo - Hello - Hillo - Hollo - Hullo

The confusing range of words spelled h[-vowel-]llo, or 'h[-vowel-]lloa', 'h[-vowel-]lloh' or 'h[-vowel-]lloo'presents occasional problems to which there are no right answers. Should you be aware of a preference among your readers for one form, it is wise for students, and courteous in all writers, to use that form. BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER WHICH SPELLING YOU USE.

The spelling variations in the first vowel are clearly due to the indistinct and often casual way in which it is realized by most speakers (see the article under 'hello, etc' in Burchfield's Fowler); those in the second vowel are partly due to the circumstances in which it appears - as a shout, a greeting, or an expression of surprise, or as verb, interjection or exclamation. In current English, only three spellings exist (there are no more 'hillo's or 'hollo's), of which on-line Fowler says "The spelling preferred is hello; hallo is more common in Br[itish] E[nglish] than in Am[erican] E[nglish]; and hullo is now the least usual, despite being the first recorded (in 1864 [OED records it in Tom Brown's Schooldays, 1857, and hallo in 1781 (Fanny Burney)]). The plural form is -os." Writers trying to record dialogue realistically produce many variations, such as 'hell-oooh', 'h'llo' and HullOH'; descriptions, often archaic, of shouting, such as to hunting dogs, or between ships or ferries and the river-bank, etc, or simply for communication at a distance are usually written h[-vowel-]lloa, or (for hunting) h[-vowel-]lloo. In American English, the form holler is more common; it is seen as an uneducated or slang word in formal British English: avoid using it.

Grammatically,

• the word most usually belongs to the word class Interjection, but it can also be a
• verb, as in 'to shout', or to summon hounds etc (most commonly written as 'to halloo' or 'to holloa'). It may be an imperative, an order given to the dogs; or it may be indicative, as in "The huntsman was hallooing the pack on".
  • In the nineteenth century, it was commonly used as an expression of surprise, as in "Hello! What's this?". This is adopted in the much-mocked stereotypical question by the British policeman, recorded in 1942 in Agatha Christie's novel The Body in the Library (1942) "Hallo, 'allo, 'allo, what's this?" In later comedy, it becomes "'allo, 'allo. 'allo: what's all this 'ere', then?"
• It seems possible that the spelling 'hello', which on-line Fowler calls "the preferred spelling", became popular after the development of the telephone, although first recorded in 1827 (US Telegraph). In this context, hello even became an adjective as applied to the women who worked in the early (manual) telephone exchanges, who were known as hello-girls. The phrase with which they answered the phone in early days, "Hello, Central", became part of the title of a popular song in 1901, Hello Central, Give Me Heaven, and also appears in Mark Twain's fantasy novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1899).

Historically, and of interest to etymologists,

• All spellings of the Hello greeting derive from the Old High German form halâ or holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn or holôn 'to fetch', which was used, according to OED, especially in hailing a ferryman.
• the oldest English form recorded in OED is Hilla or hillir, found in the late fifteenth century The Wars of Alexander as "'A! hilla, haile', quod Alexander", and in Gavin Douglas's translation of Virgil's Æneid (1513) as "thi fallowis cry out, hillir haill!", from which it seems clear that 'hilla' is a synonym for 'hail'. ('Hail', however, being derived from the Old Norse heill 'health, prosperity, good luck' and cognate with Old English hǽl, has no connection with 'hello', however spelled.)
  • By 1603, Shakespeare is using "Ill, lo, lo, ho, ho" in the mouth of Horatio (some editors say Marcellus) in Hamlet, I v 118, to which Marcellus (or Hamlet) replies "Ill, lo, lo, so, ho, so" (or, in the 1604 Quarto "Hillo, ho, ho").
  • Hillo occurs also in Smollett (Peregrine Pickle, 1751) and Disraeli (Vivian Grey, 1827).
• As early as 1699, an American source uses holler as a verb, which however remains an isolated occurrence until 1825, when the noun begins to be recorded in West of England dialects. It is now seen as an informal word meaning 'call', or related activities.
  • Hollo occurs, in the form holowynge, as a verb in 1542, and as an interjection, in the form "Hollow [there]", which indicates a meaning around 'Hey, there', in 1589. Hollo, like hillo, is not current.
• The form hallo is first recoded by OED as a verb, in the Early Journals & Letters of Fanny Burny [sic], (2003) IV. 374: "They were all hallowing at this oddity"; then in 1863, as "The groom saw him, and halloed to him to know where Mr. Grimes ... lived" (Water-babies, C. Kingsley i. 5); and in 1884 as "There must be no halloaing before we are out of the wood" (Pall Mall Gazette). As this is defined as "To shout or exclaim 'hallo!'", it seems odd that the interjection itself is not recorded before 1841, when Charles Dickens wrote "'Halloa there! Hugh!' roared John" (Barnaby Rudge x. 290). Such are the vicissitudes of studying the etymology of common words!
• The form hello, a later variant, is recorded as an interjection in 1827, and as a verb in 1834.
• Hullo isn't recorded till 1857, when Tom Hughes uses it in Tom Brown's School Days, although hulloo (which indicates the sound of the shouting) from 1568 as a verb, and from 1681 as an interjection. This is the spelling of the well-known lyric of John Peel the huntsman, whose

..."View, Halloo!" could awaken the dead,

Or the fox from his lair in the morning."

It is folk etymology - and erroneous - to think that hello or any of its variants are derived from 'hallowed' (~ 'blessed') - although Goodbye has a genuinely religious origin.

In the 1980s, BBC television ran a situation comedy set in wartime France called 'Allo 'Allo, much of whose humour (and its title) came from the distortions of English in the accents used to convey different languages, "'allo" being used as a catch-phrase for the French speakers.