Greeting People in English

Learning how to greet people in English in different ways to be very friendly and informal.

You can say ‘Hi. Hi.’ You could say ‘Hello. Hello.’

To be more formal. If it’s in the morning time before noon, so before 12 o’clock you could say, ‘Good morning and after after 12 o’clock you say ‘Good afternoon. ‘


In the evening when you meet someone after 5:00 PM you can say, ‘Good evening.’

‘Hi, good evening. How are you?’ But also when you leave someone, you can also say, ‘Good evening, I’ll see you later.’

With friends and family, you can say ‘Hi! yer, hi. yer. Hi. yer, squeezed together. ‘Hi yer’.

Less formal English would be, ‘alright’. ‘Alright.’ But this is what we would call slang. You wouldn’t use this in a business or a formal setting.

Now, quite often in English, after you say ‘hi’ or ‘hello’ or ‘good day’ or ‘good morning,’ you also follow it up with a secondary phrase to be welcoming and polite.

 For example. ‘Hi, how are you? Hello, how are you? Hello. Welcome. Good afternoon. Please come in.’.

These are all ways that we do something which is called hedging. And hedging is a form of politeness in English, and it’s very useful to make sure that you have positive conversation openers. 

So start with some polite ‘hellos’ and see how far your conversation can go!

If I was meeting a friend for a cup of coffee in a cafe, I would say, ‘Hi, how are you? ‘.

If I was getting on the bus, I would probably say ‘Hello,” or ‘Good morning.’.

If I had arrived at work, I would say, ‘Good morning.’

Now take the quiz inside the Engli-teach FREE access account and see what you would say to greet someone positively and politely in English.