What does the ‘X” mean in Xmas?
Do you find the word “Xmas,” as an abbreviation for Christmas, offensive? Many people do. You won’t find Xmas in church songbooks or even on many greeting cards. Xmas is popularly associated with a trend towards materialism, and sometimes the target of people who decry the emergence of general “holiday” observance instead of particular cultural and religious ritual.
But the history of the word “Xmas” is actually more respectable than you might suspect.
The abbreviation predates by centuries its use in gaudy advertisements. It was first used in the mid 1500s. X is the Greek letter “chi,” the initial letter in the word Χριστός which actually means “Christ.” Indeed X has been an acceptable representation of the word “Christ” for hundreds of years. This device is known as a Christogram. The ‘mas’ in Xmas is the Old English word for “mass.”