There was a Final Jeopardy question claiming this [5-letter] word was coined when the telephone was invented. So, naturally, you start thinking about the commonly-known parts to the telephone. I’m not sure if the “5-letter” clue was given. Anyway, the answer is the word “hello”!
Can this be true? How did people greet each other before then? Sure, you could say good afternoon, but no one said “hello”???
What’s the SDope on this? - Jinx
Variations on the word “hello” are very old:
“Ting a ling.”–Kurt Vonnegut, Jr./Kilgore Trout
“Is this the party to whom I am speaking?” --Lily Tomlin, as Earnestine
I always thought that, before the telephone’s invention, Hello had been used not so much as a casual greeting, but as an attention getter under presumably under difficult circumstances, as in, “Hello, up there, you distant person to whom I have to shout in order to be heard!”. Or it would be used when someone needed to yell for the sake of yelling, as when calling across a canyon to demonstrate the echo. These usages of Hello are not that different from how Ahoy is used, minus the nautical setting in which the latter usually occurs.
Early phones didn’t have the best sound quality, so people using them often had to yell into them, so yelling Hello! was a natural development.
While not directly on point, I’d like to mention that my dad and his mother (perhaps others) never answered with “Hello” but always with “all right.”
Reminds me of the thing where the old Italian guy wanted a hollow statue for his new house. When asked what kind of hollow statue, he made the familiar stretched fingers to ear maneuver and said, "You know, one of them ring-ring things where you say “Hollow, Stat-you?”
Zeldar, are you by any chance from the north of England?
Notice that C. Montgomery Burns still answers his telephone, “ahoy-hoy!”
Side note: early telephone operators were called “hello girls.”
Nope. Why do you ask, Daver914? Joke all that bad?
“Hello,” spelled as such, only appears in that form after the invention of the telephone. But it’s clearly a variant on “Hallo” and all the preceded it.
It’s comes from “hallom,” which is Hungarian for “I can hear you,” and it was coined by the (Hungarian) inventor of the telephone exchange, Tivadar Puskás.
Sorry, trabi. I’ve researched that one pretty extensively, and while Tivadar Puskas was quite a remarkable guy, there’s no good evidence to corroborate that story. The “Hello” = “Hallo” similarity is a much better answer than the “Hallom” -> “Hello” solution. It smacks of pop etymology to me, and outside some Hungarians claiming it to be true, I’ve never found any document claiming otherwise. The OED even discounts it.
Oh well, it’s still one of my favourite bits of folklore, so I think I’ll just keep on believing it. 
Actually, to be a completist there is this earlier thread about “hello” as a telephone greeting.
Plus, my phrase that “the OED even discounts it” would be better phrased as “the OED doesn’t even mention it.”
Hmmm… Quite a difference there.
Whatever. If you couldn’t find anything to support the Puskás theory, I doubt I will, methodical researcher that you are.
I shall continue to tell it to unsuspecting tourists though 
And, along the same lines, in Kleberg County, TX, the proper greeting is “Heaven-o,” instead of “Hello,” apparently to distance callers from any Satanic influences.
My pal Joe picks up a ringing phone and says: “GO!!”
Quite unsettling sometimes.
My grandmother used to pick up the phone with, “well?” Also a bit unsettling. Wonder if she ever talked to Joe?
The tradition Polish way of picking up the phone is “slucham,” which translates into “(I’m) Listening.” Always struck me as abrupt.