Ahoy (greeting)

Graffiti on a house wall in Bratislava, Slovak Republic: a sketch of a winking girl, a heart, and the word 'Ahoj'.

Ahoy is a word used to signal a ship or boat, stemming from the Middle English cry, 'Hoy!'. The word had fallen into obsolescence before rising from obscurity as the sport of sailing rose in popularity. 'Ahoy' can be used as a greeting, a warning, or a farewell.

Ahoy is a combination of the call 'hoy' plus the sound 'a', presumably added to draw more attention to the cry. 'Hoy!' was a common call in England to drive cattle. The earliest known example is from William Langland, in whose 1393 epic poem, Piers the Ploughman, the word first appears in Middle English: 'And holpen to erie þis half acre with ’hoy! troly! lolly!'

'Hoi' is used in Modern Dutch as an informal greeting equivalent to English 'hi' or 'hey'.

Alexander Graham Bell originally suggested 'ahoy' be adopted as the standard greeting when answering a telephone, before 'Hello' (suggested by Thomas Edison) became common.^{[citation needed]} In The Simpsons, Mr Burns is usually heard answering the phone with the greeting 'Ahoy-hoy'.

Czech and Slovak

In Czech and Slovak, 'Ahoj' (pronounced [ˈaɦɔj]) is a commonly used informal greeting, comparable to "Hello". It was borrowed from English, and gained wide currency by the 1930s.