evidence: Fast-forward to the late 19th century: "hello" began to gain traction as a telephone greeting in America. It was first used by Alexander Graham Bell due to its warm and inviting sound. By the early 20th century, it had become so prevalent that dictionaries included it as a regular salutation. [...] A salutation that is known far and wide, but its beginnings aren’t as straightforward as one may think. Tracing it back to the mid-1800s when it first appeared in print, "hello" was seen as an informal substitute for the more formal "how do you do?". This all changed with Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who proposed that his assistant Thomas Watson answer calls with a "hello" instead of "ahoy". From there, this phrase quickly gained traction and became a universal greeting. [...] An oft-uttered word, yet with a hidden past. ‘Hello’ – an interjection first popularized by Thomas Carlyle in his 1827 work Sartor Resartus, and later embraced by Alexander Graham Bell as the telephone greeting of choice. Yet its emergence did not stop there. Across the globe, cultures have developed their own variations – Guten Tag in Germany, Konnichiwa in Japan, Namaste in India and Salaam Alaikum in Pakistan.