In the English language, many letters make up some of the most common words in the English language. However, some letters are not quite as popular. One of those letters would be X. It actually starts with fewer words than just about any other letter in the alphabet!
Guess How Many Letters There Are In The Alphabet
The answer to that question, by the way, is 26. But what letter(s) start the fewest words? That would be X. In fact, if you removed all of its derivative terms from our base vocabulary (all words starting with X-ray or Xenon, for example), there would be only one word left that starts with an X: xenophobia.
R E A D M O R E
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It's worth
noting that although we've never said it in class before, xylophone also counts
as a word that starts with an X because it's simply short for
xylophones—plural of xylophone. That little bit of trivia aside, though, I hope
you learned something today!
How Many Common Words Start With Each Letter
One common approach to measuring frequency is to look at how many letters each letter of the alphabet starts. Because there are 26 letters, and you can only use each letter once per word, a graph of frequencies would have 26 bars, one for each letter.
However, it turns out that not all of these graphs are created
equal: while some letters start a lot of words (like T), others (X) don't. The
least-used letter when it comes to starting words? You guessed it: X. Here's
how many common words begin with every single letter! X comes in dead last when
it comes to word beginnings with just 48 (roughly 1% as many as any other
single-letter word beginning). Pretty wild!
A Graph of Word Counts
This chart shows us which letters start which words. We can use it to see how many words begin with any particular letter. Our question is How many words begin with x? and we're given a sentence of twenty-six letters (A-Z) that includes all 26 letters and only one x.
This means there are 726 possible 5-letter combinations, 726 possible 6-letter combinations, 726 possible 7-letter combinations, and finally 2*726=1452 total word possibilities of exactly five letters; 1*726=726 for six letters; 1*726=726 for seven; 2*726=1452 for eight. So how many words start with x? Of these 1452 possibilities, there are two that start with x: Xen and xebec.
Thus, we have our answer: The letter X starts with the
fewest number of words in English.
The Interesting History Of the X
While you may think of it as a mysterious, complex letter—X’s have actually been part of our writing system for a long time. Ever heard of The Phoenicians? They first introduced their alphabet to Ancient Greece and Persia; however, not all Phoenician letters made it through: We only have 22 Phoenician letters today, whereas they originally had 24.
While there was some debate about which letters should be tossed out (quite literally!), one is fairly obvious: The letter that looks like a stick figure man hugging himself—the culprit behind many an argument at cocktail parties is known as Chi. According to Wikipedia, [Phoenician] chi represented /ki/, a sound not found in Greek. In later times, Greeks dropped chi and used khi instead [and gave us our modern-day K].
So while we know it now as Ki or Chi, we owe its existence to ancient Semitic people who thought it looked like someone holding themselves close...which kind of makes sense if you look at how closely related these two characters are!
For
example, here's where X originated from: But wait—there's more! What do you
think would happen if we swapped them around? Can you guess what K came from
then? Yep! That's right—an upside-down X! Check it out below: This isn't even
half of what I could tell you about X's...but maybe that'll be a post for
another day :) Now back to your regularly scheduled programming :)
A Letter Experiment
Look at any text you are writing and see if any words you write begin with x. You will discover that most of your letters don’t start with words. We rarely use it to start a word.
In fact, depending on how many books you read or how much literature you write, you may be shocked to find out how rarely we use it at all. Even compared to Y, there are way more words beginning with Y than X.
This means that if you are writing anything—even if it doesn’t involve much
thought or consideration of language—you can find a better way of saying
something by replacing your use of X with Y.