Pop Goes The News — In the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire, Dorothy (Renée Zellweger) uttered a now-iconic phrase to Jerry (Tom Cruise): “You had me at hello.”

Nearly 20 years later, the word “hello” is still hot in pop culture.

British singer Adele unveiled the video this week for “Hello” (directed by Canada’s Xavier Dolan), the first single off her forthcoming album 25 — only a couple of weeks after Canadian pop rock group Hedley released the single “Hello” from its new album of the same name.

Both songs instantly evoke classic “hello” songs.

Hedley’s brings to mind 1967’s “Hello, Goodbye” by The Beatles: The lyrics of the former include “Don’t say goodbye, just say hello (hello)” while the latter has “I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello (hello, hello).”

(In 2014’s “We’ll Pick Up Where We Left Off,” O.A.R. sings: “Don’t say goodbye, just say goodnight.”)

The opening moments of Adele’s single are eerily similar to the early chorus of Lionel Richie’s 1983 hit ballad “Hello” — she sings “Hello? It’s me” and he sings “Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?”

Not surprisingly, the similarity sparked amateur video editing.

The videos for Adele’s “Hello” and Richie’s “Hello” couldn’t be more different, though — hers tells the story of a woman in the wake of a failed relationship while his is a decidedly creepy tale of a teacher in love with his blind student.

Adele spent several days at a farm outside Montreal last month to make the video, which is the first partially shot using IMAX (a Canadian technology). It was viewed more than 27 million times in its first two days online and, naturally, elicited some notes.

https://twitter.com/ira/status/657443662700412928

This month’s double-dose of “hello” in pop music is purely coincidental and certainly nothing extraordinary, of course.

Canadian group Dragonette’s biggest hit was “Hello,” a 2010 collaboration with Martin Solveig, and artists like Prince, Oasis and Evanescence have recorded songs titled “Hello.”

The word also appears in more than 200 song titles —including ‘60s tracks like Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!” and The Doors hit “Hello, I Love You” and ‘80s songs like “Hello, Again” from Neil Diamond and Phil Collins’ “We Said Hello, Goodbye.”