More Fun Facts

Christmas or Xmas: which is it?

With the advent of new technology (particularly handheld telephones) came a new and somewhat baffling development: the creation of text-speak.

Text-speak is the process of shortening words by either removing letters (vowels usually) or replacing them with numbers. While this serves the purpose of making the process of typing a message faster and cheaper (since longer messages sent via SMS are more expensive!), it can be somewhat baffling to those not used to the shortcuts.

On a bit of side note, it is interesting that this new dialect seems quite limited to the written form. Any attempt to speak it out loud is both impractical and quite difficult despite the fact that all of them are words and phrases used in everyday conversation.

A holiday themed word that seems to be getting a lot of condemnation is Xmas. Used as a shorthand for Christmas, there are some people who claim that it’s incorrect to use “Xmas” as it supposedly takes the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas.

Some even go as far as saying that the word Xmas as a part of an overall “war on Christmas”. While it may be true that there are people who might use Xmas in that manner, the actual origin of the term Xmas has nothing to do with taking Christ out of Christ-mas.

In the Greek language and alphabet, the letter that looks like an X is the letter chi (pronounced kye, it rhymes with high) which represents the word ???????, which translates in English to “Christ”.

In fact, the early church used the letter chi (P) together with the letter rho (P) to create a symbol that was to represent the name of Jesus Christ (see featured image). Eventually, this system of writing spread to even non-religious work where mentions of “Christ” would be replaced by the letter chi. For example, some documents from the renaissance period would spell out Christine as “Xtine”.

So, yes. Xmas also means the same as Christmas and should be read as Christ-mas and not as “ex”-mas!