AHOY!

[Q] From Dave Nash: I have heard that ahoy derives from a Czech greeting, apparently popularised by sailors docking in English speaking ports — from the Czech ahoj, meaning ‘hello’.

[A] You’ve brightened my day by supplying yet another folk etymology to add to my growing collection. Ahoj, said the same way as ahoy, is indeed used informally in Czech, and more widely still, I’m told, in Slovak.

It’s too coincidental a similarity of form not to be believable but there’s no truth in it. In fact, your informant has it exactly backwards. Jan Čulík, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies at the University of Glasgow, tells me that Czech ahoj is a modern introduction from English, borrowed from the sailor’s hail. A Czech etymological dictionary of 2001 says that it was introduced by hikers, boy scouts, sportsmen and young people; it came into wide use in the 1930s when hiking and scouting became generally widespread, though there are examples on record from as far back as the 1880s, when it was used, for example, as a word of command for the horses pulling sleighs.

Ahoy in English goes back well over a century further, at least as far as 1751, when Tobias Smollett used it in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle: “While he was thus occupied, a voice, still more uncouth than the former, bawled aloud, ‘Ho! the house, a-hoy!’”

It’s based on hoy, an even older cry dating from medieval times, a formalised spelling of a natural or inarticulate cry. The first person known to have written it down was William Langland, in his poem Piers Plowman, in the fourteenth century. It was used when driving pigs or cattle, or when you wanted to attract a person’s attention.

In particular — and this is where a maritime connection really does appear — sailors used it to hail another ship. Ahoy was a development of this that added force to the cry.

I was wakened — indeed, we were all wakened, for I could see even the sentinel shake himself together from where he had fallen against the door-post — by a clear, hearty voice hailing us from the margin of the wood: “Block house, ahoy!” it cried. “Here’s the doctor.”

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883).

Alexander Graham Bell suggested ahoy as the way to answer his new telephone and operators at the first exchange did just that. This seemed too peremptory for others and hello replaced it, a word of the early nineteenth-century that was based on earlier shouts such as the hunting-field cry hollo!

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