Xmas

The letter X in Xmas is the Greek letter chi, the first character of Χριστός (Christos), the Greek word for the anointed one. Medieval scribes in Britain used X as a standard abbreviation for Christ in manuscripts, saving precious vellum and ink. The chi-rho monogram, combining Χ and Ρ (rho), was already ancient by the time English Christianity absorbed it from Latin scribal tradition. The abbreviation was theological, not shorthand.

The earliest recorded use of Xmas in English dates to a 1551 almanac. By the 16th century, scribes and printers routinely contracted Christmas to Xmas without any sense of irreverence. The abbreviation appeared in letters, church records, and printed pamphlets throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Samuel Coleridge used Xmas in an 1801 letter without explanation or apology.

The objection that Xmas takes Christ out of Christmas gained force in the mid-20th century, particularly in American evangelical circles where the Greek origin of the X had been forgotten. What looked like commercial shorthand was actually a scribal tradition older than the King James Bible. The X was never hiding Christ; it was one of the oldest abbreviations for him in the Christian written record.

The word Christmas itself combines Old English Cristes, the genitive of Crist from Latin Christus, with mæsse, meaning a church feast. The Old English form Cristes mæsse first appears in a manuscript from 1038. Xmas compresses nearly a thousand years of orthographic history into four letters. None of them are arbitrary.