evidence: Hello is a greeting that is understood almost everywhere in the world, but it hasn’t always been so. In fact, hello is a relatively young word, dating only back to 1827 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. [...] Hello began catching on as a greeting through the 19th century, but it wasn’t until the telephone was invented that its future was sealed. A mythology even developed around the connection between phones and hello. One story says that Thomas Edison, whose exploits are often exaggerated, invented the word hello from whole cloth. (He didn’t.) Stranger is the story that telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell chose hello as a phone greeting because it was the name of his girlfriend, one Margaret Hello. (She never existed — Bell developed the telephone while he was engaged to Mabel Hubbard, and she would be his wife until his death in 1922.) [...] Hello had become such a widespread lexical innovation that it caught the notice of Mark Twain, who used it as a symbol of the distance between Washington politicians and the common man in the following article, which appeared in the Post on February 9, 1868 — a decade before the ahoy/hello controversy: