X

And Now We Pause for a Few Words
and Numbers that Begin with X

• Hatred or fear of foreigners: xenophobia.
• Garden that requires little or no water: xeriscape.
• Socrates’ wife: Xantippe, reputedly a shrew,
  so a “xantippe” came to mean a scolding, nagging,
  ill-tempered woman. On the other hand, she may have
  been just a strong-willed person inclined to speak her mind.
  
• Number of pages the unabridged second edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language devotes to words that start with x: II (i.e. 2). [1] Compare with the number of pages said dictionary bestows on s: CLXXXVIII. Or with the X on q. Even z gets VI. The XXIVth letter of the English alphabet, x begins no bottom-word in English, though it wins plenty of work in porn and in marking the spot.
• The process of dry photocopying that Chester Carlson invented in MCMXXXVIII: xerography. More than XX companies and the U.S. military rejected Carlson’s invention as redundant—“Why do we need a machine to copy stuff when we have abundant people to copy stuff?”—before the Haloid Photographic Company took a flyer and licensed it in MCMXLVI. HPC changed its name to Haloid Xerox in MCMLVIII, then to just plain Xerox in MCMLXI. [2]
• XIVth letter of the Greek alphabet: xi (ξ). In particle physics, a xi is a baryon composed of three quarks, a quark being an elementary particle and thus a fundamental constituent of matter (for now). [3]
• “Buttocks” in Otomi, an indigenous language of central Mexico: xiji. Muchas gracias to the person or persons who agreed to express Otomi’s voiceless alveopalatal fricative (the ⟨sh⟩ sound in, for example, “shiver”) with the letter x.
• Mexican hairless dogs and a Tijuana soccer team: xoloitzcuintles, “xolos” for short.“Xoloitzcuintle” combines two Nahuatl [4] words: Xolotl, the dog-like Aztec deity who guards the sun during her nightly run through the underworld; and itzcuīntli, the Nahuatl word for “dog.”
• Iron’s atomic number: XXVI, which is also the gematria [5] value of God. [6]

xoloitzcuintle