The secret history of “Xmas” (the word)…

Where, you may ask, does that annoying word “Xmas” come from? Is it just a linguistic marketing ploy to get a blunt message across in fewer letters? Well… yes, sort of. But perhaps not quite in the way you think…

In English, we write “Christ”, but his name was originally “Χριστος” [Christos] in Greek – for according to Thomas S. McCall, “there is no evidence that the Gospels were written originally in any other language but Greek”. Yes, I know, parts may possibly have been written in Aramaic, but all the same they seem to have made the transition to Greek very quickly.

Fast forward to 324 CE when the newly-converted Emperor Constantine the Great (indeed, he of Constantinople fame) was inspired by a dream – as some chroniclers would have us believe – to modify his army’s labara (errrm, the standards soldiers carried into battle) to [presumably] display its allegiance with Christ. This intersecting “chi-rho” (Χ-ρ) shape was a favoured propagandist accessory for Constantine, appearing on his helmet as well as many coins of the period. My point here being that “Χρ” was used right from the start as an abbreviating shorthand, though for Constantine arguably more for political reasons than for religious ones.

Once again, fast forward to 1100 CE when the Anglo-Saxon chronicle mentioned “Xp̄es mæsse” where the rho was superscripted with a scribal ‘macron’ (or, more precisely, a horizontal overbar) to indicate contraction of the following syllable). OK, this isn’t exactly “Merry Xmas” yet, but you can at least now see where this is headed.

With the introduction of printing, using “X” as a shorthand for “Christ” started to accelerate. Remembering that the 15th century fell in the historical shorthand lull between the mad proliferation of early medieval Tironian notae and the start of modern shorthand (with Bright’s Characterie in the late 16th century), and you can see why “X” was frequently used by early printers as an abbreviation for Christ. From that same general abbreviating period came Mr Ratcliff of Plymouth, who aggressively hacked away at the Lord’s Prayer thus:-

Our Fth wch rt n hvn ; hlwd b y Nm
Y Kgdm cm Y wl b dn n rth z it s n Hvn

All in all, if you’re looking for a way to write “Christ” quickly and precisely, rest assured that “X” marks that particular spot, and has done for nearly two millennia. And in case you still think “Xmas” is a little bit, errrrm, ‘Asda’, do please consider that Coleridge (1801), Byron (1811) and Lewis Carroll (1864) all happily used the word (so says Wikipedia, though I slightly doubt that it appeared in any of their canonical poems, nonsense or otherwise).

Curiously, the predictive texting on my vintage-2010 mobile doesn’t deign to recognize “xmas”, which is surely just anti-historical snobbery on the part of T9’s English dictionary compilers. Yet even now X still abbreviates for quite a few different “Christ” soundalikes:
* florists despairing at the length of the word “chrysanthemums” write “xanths”;
* electronics engineers have long written ‘xtal’ for “crystal (oscillator)”; and
* Christina Aguilera sometimes writes her name as “Xtina”, bless her sort-of-dirrty little tush. “X/bike”!

Love or loathe the word, it seems that we’re stuck with Xmas. I just wish you all a happy one! 🙂