Why Do People Say Xmas? The X Is Greek and 900 Years Old

Somebody says it every December, and they mean it: Xmas is what happens when the Christ gets taken out of Christmas. The X reads as a blank where a name should be, an advertiser’s economy that saves four letters on a shop sign.

The complaint is sincere. It is also about eight centuries younger than the spelling it objects to, and the people who started that spelling were Christian scribes handling a name they treated as sacred.

Why do people say Xmas?

Because the X is not the English letter X. It is the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Christos, the Greek word that became Christ in English. English writers were using X and Xp as shorthand for Christ by around 1100, so the spelling carries the name in Greek rather than deleting it.

The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the letter to “early 12c. as an abbreviation of ‘Christ’”, and its entry for Xmas is exact about the mechanism: the Latin X and the Greek chi look identical and sound nothing alike, and the whole abbreviation rides on that accident of shape. A letter can also stand in for a shape and no word, which is the whole story of the T in T-shirt: laid flat, the garment’s body and sleeves make a capital T. Chi is the 22nd letter of the Greek alphabet and represents a kh sound.

The X worked on every word built on Christ’s name

Christmas was never the special case. Hugh Rawson, writing on Cambridge’s dictionary blog, lists Xtian for Christian, Xtianity for Christianity, Xpher for Christopher, Xene for Christine and Xtina for Christina. The collected documentary record adds Xpian as a rarer form of Christian, and reports the Oxford English Dictionary citing X- and Xp- for Christ- as early as 1485 and Xtianity from 1634.

Those forms were not the work of people cutting corners on a sacred word. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage records that most of the evidence for these words comes from “educated Englishmen who knew their Greek.”

A paper trail that starts on a battlefield

Date	What was written
28 October 312	Chi-Rho, chi laid over rho, carried at the Milvian Bridge
around 1100	X for Christ in English, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
1485	X- and Xp- standing for Christ-
1551	X’temmas
1634	Xtianity
1721	Xmas, per the Oxford English Dictionary third edition
1800	”Xmas. Christmas.” listed among common abbreviations in Boston

The Chi-Rho is chi superimposed on rho, the first two letters of Christos. Lactantius records Constantine being told to mark the sign on his soldiers’ shields before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge on 28 October 312. When it moved onto the labarum, the emperor’s own military standard, is less settled: Eusebius describes that standard in the later wars against Licinius, and the record for the labarum shows little evidence of use before 317.

At the modern end of the chain, the fifth American edition of William Perry’s Royal Standard English Dictionary, printed in Boston in 1800, listed “Xmas. Christmas.” in its table of common abbreviations. The first date for the modern spelling is unsettled: two sources reading the same dictionary give 1721 and 1755, with Rawson taking the later figure and the Wikipedia entry citing the OED’s third edition for the earlier one. They agree on 1551 for X’temmas.

Shortening a sacred name was a sign of respect

The habit those scribes were following has a name. Nomina sacra is the contraction of divine names and titles in Greek biblical manuscripts, written with an overline across the letters that were kept. Bruce Metzger counted 15 words treated this way, among them God, Lord, Jesus, Christ, Spirit, Cross and Savior, and the practice shows up consistently in the earliest surviving Christian writings, from around the second century.

The contraction was an act of reverence rather than a purely practical space-saving device. Scribes used it in manuscripts where they avoided shortening far commoner words, and they wrote the shortened sacred name with generous spacing around it.

The reason a practice exists is often not the reason a modern reader assumes, the same way the point of nailing iron to a horse’s foot is not the one most people guess. The X was a marker of respect for a name too important to spell out casually.

The crossing-out story is folklore, and it runs backwards

Rawson calls the belief that Xmas “takes the Christ out of Christmas” a misapprehension, and puts it down to not knowing where the abbreviation came from. Origin stories get attached to old habits after the fact, much as the plague explanation for saying bless you after a sneeze cannot actually be sourced.

The dates settle the direction of travel. Coleridge wrote Xmas in 1801, Byron in 1811, Lewis Carroll in 1864, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in a letter in 1923. None of them appears to have thought it needed defending. The objection that arrived afterwards was a matter of taste before it was a matter of theology: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, quoted by Rawson, judged that “in spite of a long and respectable history, today Xmas is offensive to many, perhaps because of its associations with advertising.”

The offence is real even where the etymology is not. Lifeway Research reported in December 2018 that 42 percent of Christians say it is offensive when people say X-mas instead of Christmas, though that page does not publish the sample behind the figure.

Saying EKS-mas out loud is the one modern part

Here the critics have a point the history supports. Xmas and its older variants began as handwriting abbreviations for a word still spoken as Christmas, so the spelling pronunciation EKS-mas is the piece of this that is actually new. Newer abbreviations get the same argument over sound: the inventor of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, insisted on jif, while 65.6 percent of developers in Stack Overflow’s 2017 survey chose the hard g.

The British lexicographer Eric Partridge drew that line himself in Usage and Abusage, calling Xmas “barely allowable in its common use in writing and printing” and “intolerable in the pronunciation, Exmas.” A written shorthand outliving the explanation for it is ordinary enough, and the disputed radio code behind a nickname for the police has the same shape.

Xmas is the member of that shorthand family you still see on a card. Xtian, Xtianity, Xpher and Xene fell out of ordinary English and survive in old letters and dictionaries of usage, which leaves the last one standing on its own, carrying a Greek letter that hardly anybody reading it can still identify. On the documentary evidence, the complaint about the spelling is an argument with a medieval scribe’s mark of respect. Strictly FYI.