Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is attested in writing as early as the 1830s.

Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications as early as 1833. These include an 1833 American book called The Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett, of West Tennessee, which was reprinted that same year in The London Literary Gazette.

The word was extensively used in literature by the 1860s.^{[citation needed]}

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo, which came from Old High German "halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman." 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'). As in addition to hello, halloo,hallo, hollo, hullo and (rarely) hillo also exist as variants or related words, the word can be spelt using any of all five vowels.

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.Alexander Graham Bell initially used Ahoy (as used on ships) as a telephone greeting. However, in 1877, Edison wrote to T.B.A. David, the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh:

Bereket Mengisteab (Ge'ez: በረኸት መንግስተአብ, 1938) is a well-known Eritrean songwriter, composer and singer.

Mengisteab was born in 1938 in Hazega, a village in Eritrea, approximately 20 km north-west Asmara, the capital. He spent his early life in the village farming, taught himself to play the Krar and took part in the musical events that were part of the local rural culture. He moved to Asmara for a few years where his musical performances were limited to his friends.

In 1961 he moved to Addis Ababa and joined the Haile Selassie Theater Orchestra. He remained with the orchestra for over a decade and performed with them all over Ethiopia as well as Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, at the 1966 Festival mondial des Arts Nègres in Senegal, and at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico. He recorded his first singles during this period, nine singles for the Philips label. He left the orchestra 1973, a year before Haile Selassie was deposed by the "Derg" led by Mengistu Haile Mariam. During mid-1970s Mengisteab was the only Eritrean artist broadcasted on the radio, his krar music and usage of the Tigrinya language assured his popularity. While living in Addis Ababa, Mengisteab and his wife ran a music shop. He formed his own group in Addis Ababa, Megaleh Guayla (echo of the dance).