ONOMA

The letter X

Greek chi, through Etruscan from the Western Greek alphabet.

X

origin: Greek chi, through Etruscan from the Western Greek alphabet
carried no numeric value
in surnames: 4 / 315 (1%)

the Greek alphabet had two regional forms, and they disagreed about this letter: in the Western (Euboean) form X already meant [ks], in the Eastern (Ionic) form it meant a rough [kh]. Latin took the Western value through Etruscan; the Cyrillic Х took the Eastern one. Same drawing, two jobs, and the split happened inside Greek itself.

examples from the corpus

Baxter · Cox · Dixon · Fox

Its place in the row

In the modern alphabet this letter is number 24 of 26. Before it comes W, after it Y. The order itself is inherited: Latin took it from Greek, Greek from Phoenician, and the sequence has survived largely unchanged for about three thousand years. Every rearrangement since has been an insertion, not a reshuffle.

What this letter does in a name

This is a consonant: it sets the hardness of a name and how it meets the next word. In a corpus of 315 surnames none begins with it; 2 end on it. Among the 96 given names in the base it appears in 1. One occurrence per surname is the ceiling: no surname in the corpus repeats this letter.

Alexander

Letters from the same source

These letters came from the Greek alphabet.

ABCDEHIKLMNOPQRSTYZ

The whole alphabet

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Read a name

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