“Christmas” is a weird word
Merry Sending of the Smeared One!
Professor Barleygrow thumbs through the pile of colourful letters that have arrived for him. ‘Tis the season of the Christmas letter, a time to hear from acquaintances old and new about all their surgeries, renovations, trips abroad, and, of course, to learn of any newly minted dentists in the family.
Worst, he thinks, are the letters composed in Microsoft Word, printed out and signed at the bottom like so many letters of congratulation sent out of duty by Members of Parliament to centenarians in their constituency.
A pox upon all of it.
He almost says, “Bah, humbug!” to himself, but decides against it. That would be going too far.
As he sorts through the letters, sending most of them directly and without ceremony into the bin, Barleygrow’s eye is drawn to one that has come to him in garb much unlike the others. It is clad in a plain envelope, unbedecked by images of ivy or holly. It’s not even red, green, or gold.
Who could this be from?
He turns over the envelope and sees a familiar name, written with no steady hand, seemingly in crayon, above the return address.
He hastens to open the envelope and removes the letter inside. It reads as follows:
DEER PROFFESOR BARLE GRO,
MERY CRISMUS
YOUR FREND AND NEFEW,
BILLY
Billy! It warms the old professor’s heart that his beloved great-nephew (once removed) has remembered him this year.
His spelling, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired.
Barleygrow takes the letter to his desk and begins to pen a reply, which he starts by returning the greetings of his dear nephew. The remainder of the letter is occupied by a point-by-point correction of the young man’s spelling mistakes.
When Barleygrow reaches the matter of the correct spelling of the word Christmas, however, his pen pauses in midair. He sets it down. The boy’s spelling Crismus reminds him of something he once read somewhere. But where?
He’s now on the hunt. Where has he read Crismus before?
He ponders. He paces. He turns the question over in his mind. For a long time, nothing comes.
Then it hits him.
“The Verney Papers!” he cries out, to no one at all. He is alone in his office.
He searches through his files, which takes a while, as he’s not particularly organized. But, before long, he finds them: the Varney Papers. They’re a collection of 17th-century correspondence from one of the great families of Buckinghamshire.
In one of these letters, from 1639, the Lady Sussex spelled the holiday not as we would spell it today, like Christmas, but how she herself pronounced it: Crismus.
“The little plagiarist!” exclaims Barleygrow. He takes academic dishonesty very seriously. One word plagiarized at age six could become an entire dissertation plagiarized by the time Jimmy reaches the doctoral level. No, a stop must be put to this right away.
He crumples up his jolly reply and begins to write something much sterner. A copy will have to go to the Dean as well…
Merry Christmas, Professor Barleygrow.
You’re reading The Dead Language Society. I’m Colin Gorrie, linguist, ancient language teacher, and your guide through the history of the English language and its relatives.
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I’m just glad we don’t call it Grime-mas
Of course, we know Jimmy is no plagiarist. He’s merely spelled Christmas the way it sounds, as any young child might be tempted to do. Christmas is one of the weirder words in the English language, at least as far as its spelling is concerned.
The origin of the word, on the other hand, is clear enough: Christmas is Christ’s mass. The spelling makes that much more transparent than many other Old English compounds.
The difficulty is not in figuring out where the word Christmas comes from, but in how it came to have the pronunciation (and meaning) it has today.
When the word Christmas first appeared in the English language, it had the form Crīstes mæsse, literally ‘Christ’s mass.’
Since Christianity was brought to England largely through the labours of the Roman Church, it comes as no surprise that both parts making up the phrase Crīstes mæsse are Latin loanwords.
Crīst ‘Christ’ comes from Latin Chrīstus, which is itself a loanword from the Ancient Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós ‘anointed.’
The Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós is not a loanword. In fact, it’s a native Greek word: the past participle of a verb χρῑ́ω khrī́ō ‘to smear with (especially in reference to olive oil).’
And the verb χρῑ́ω khrī́ō has a long pedigree, going all the way back to the most distant ancestor of Greek, the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. We know the root goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European because it has relatives in the other languages Proto-Indo-European spun off, among them English.
The native English relative of the Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós is the word grime, which is certainly something — altogether less pleasant than olive oil — that can get smeared on you.
Although the Ancient Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós isn’t a loanword, it is a kind of “loan concept.”
Being anointed with oil had a special meaning in a Biblical context. It referred to a ritual by which someone or something — often kings — became consecrated. The Hebrew word for a person so consecrated is מָשִׁיחַ māšîaḥ ‘anointed,’1 which is also the source of the English word Messiah, which is taken as a loanword.
While admitting that this is far from my area of expertise, I should explain briefly why the Greek language needed a word for messiah.
The concept of an ‘anointed one’ became rather important in the course of history. During the Second Temple period (516 BC–70 AD) within Judaism, it came to refer to a future king from the line of David who would rule the Jewish people, either in a political sense or in a more apocalyptic sense. This messianic idea took on a different character in the movement that would become Christianity, where the Messiah was identified also as the Son of God.
At this time, the Eastern Mediterranean had been under Greek-speaking rule for centuries, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). As a result, many Jews ended up speaking Greek, as did many of the early Christians. So these Greek-speaking Jews (and later, Christians) needed a word for this rather important concept of Messiah.
When there is a word or phrase in another language which you want to adopt, you have two options. One is to take the foreign word or phrase into the language directly, as Latin did in adapting the Greek word χρῑστός khrīstós into a Latin word Chrīstus.
The other option is to translate each individual part of the word or phrase literally. This is called a calque or a loan translation. Other examples of calques in English are brainwashing (from the Chinese 洗腦 xǐnǎo), flea market (from French marché aux puces), and worldview (from German Weltanschauung).
This is what the Greeks did with the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ māšîaḥ ‘anointed.’ Rather than taking the Hebrew word into Greek as a loanword,2 they made a calque using their pre-existing word for ‘anointed’: χρῑστός khrīstós.
So that’s what put the Christ in Christmas. And, believe it or not, that was the straightforward half of the job.
“Now go away”
The -mas in Christmas comes from the Old English mæsse, the source of Modern English mass (as in the church service). This is another Latin loanword. It comes from the post-classical word missa ‘dismissal.’
It’s post-classical in the sense that you’re not going to find missa used in this way in Caesar or Cicero. But missa does have impeccable classical precedents. It’s nothing but a noun formed from the past participle of the verb mittere, which gives us all the English verbs ending in -mit, such as transmit, remit, submit, etc., as well as words like mission ‘a sending.’
In the Classical period, missa meant ‘something sent’. It’s not too much of a stretch for ‘something sent’ to start to be used more abstractly for a dismissal, or a ‘sending away.’
The more mysterious question is how a word meaning ‘dismissal’ turned into a name for a liturgical service. There are two main explanations floating around, both of which rely on a dismissal that occurs during the service.
One is the missa catechumenorum or ‘dismissal of the catechumens,’ which occurs before the Eucharist.
A catechumen is someone who is undergoing instruction in the faith but who has not yet been baptized. In the early Roman mass, the catechumens were allowed to be present only for the first portion. They were required to leave before the Eucharist, hence the name ‘dismissal of the catechumens.’ From there, the whole service took on the name missa. This was St. Jerome’s explanation.
The other explanation is that the dismissal referred to the dismissal of the congregation, which occurs at the end of the service: Ite, missa est, which means ‘Go, it’s the dismissal.’3
Now we understand where each of the two halves of the word Christmas come from, and more or less how they reached the English language. But it’s actually the later history of the word Christmas that explains the great divergence between how it’s said and how it’s spelled.
Still need a super last-minute gift idea? No judgement. I’ll just leave this button here…
Divinity, serenity, insanity, and Christmas
The biggest mystery about the word Christmas is this: Given the way the word Christ is pronounced in Modern English, we might expect Christmas to share that same long i vowel — the sound we hear in the word my. But it doesn’t.
Depending on where and when you learned English, you may have learned that the i sound in mine or ride or write (or Christ) is called long i.4 Let’s run with that name: it’s actually useful here.
If you’ve learned other European languages, you’ve probably encountered the fact that the English long i vowel, the one in mine, doesn’t have much to do with the vowels spelled i in other languages, which tend to sound more like the ee sound in see.
The reason for all this is historical. The vowel we call long i in comes mostly from an Old English vowel which actually did sound like the i in other European languages. Today, when writing Old English, we spell long i like this: ī, with the line over top to mark it as long. So Modern English mine, ride, write, Christ correspond to Old English mīn, rīdan, wrītan, Crīst.
There was also a short version of that same vowel, which we write as i. This vowel has stayed more or less the same all through the entire recorded history of English. It always sounded more or less like the vowels in his (from Old English his), bid (biddan), or with (Old English wið5)... or, for that matter, like the vowel in Christmas.
Now let me train you to think like a linguistic detective. When we hear a vowel like mine in a Modern English word, we think “that vowel was probably a long ī in Old English.” When we see a vowel like his in Modern English, we think “that was short i in Old English.”
So the mystery is this: Why does the pronunciation of Christ differ between its use alone and in the word Christmas? Alone, in the word Christ, the pronunciation seems to imply a long ī in Old English. In Christmas, it seems to imply that it had a short i. So which was it?
We might think to consult the Old English manuscripts. But, in fact, the length of the vowel in the Old English form is unclear. When we write Old English today, we write the line over the long vowels to show they were long. But the Anglo-Saxons did no such thing. They just assumed you knew whether a vowel was long or short. So they wrote Crist.
So, if we want to know whether the i in Crist was long or short, we have to find another source of evidence.
Fortunately, we have just the right kind of evidence, albeit in a slightly later stage of the language. It comes to us from a book called Ormulum, written around the late 12th century. This book, almost uniquely for early English, writes long and short vowels differently. How does it write Crist? In a way that leaves no doubt that the author considered it to have a long vowel.6
So how did Christmas acquire a short vowel?
The reason can be found in a process that has occurred repeatedly throughout the history of English. Think of word pairs like divine vs. divinity, insane vs. insanity, or serene vs. serenity.
In each of these examples, the first vowel is the kind we’d expect to descend from a long vowel in earlier English: divine (long i), insane (long a), serene (long e).7 The second vowel is the kind you would expect to descend from a short version of that same vowel: divinity (short i), insanity (short a), serenity (short e).
You can listen to what these vowel pairs would have sounded like in Middle English below (although I swapped out insane/insanity for cave/cavity, since the word insane didn’t come into English until later):
Clearly each pair of words is related. So why does one have a long vowel and the other a short vowel?
What’s blood got to do with it?
The answer lies in a process called Trisyllabic Shortening.8 It’s a process that kept happening over and over again in the history of the English language. The precise details are intricate, and vary a little from one century to another, but the outline is constant: when English acquires sequences of a long vowel in a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, it shortens the long vowel.
So, for example, when the long ī vowel in Middle English divīne (here I’m marking the long vowel for clarity’s sake) is at the end of the word, it remains and becomes the vowel we get in Modern English divine. But when that same vowel is followed by the two unstressed syllables of the ending -ity, the long vowel shortens: divīne + -ity is not divīnity but divinity.
The same process also happened fairly early on in Old English, probably in the 7th century. Another religious — and simultaneously gory — example is how the word bless, with a short e vowel, originates from a form blēdsian ‘to consecrate with blood,’[^n] with the long ē we also see in blēdan ‘bleed.’
Yes, the word bless means to consecrate with blood. So watch who you sneeze around.
Now we can see how this applies to Christ (with a long ī) and Christmas (with a short i). The Old English phrase was Crīstes mæsse ‘Christ’s mass,’ or, put together into one word, Crīstmæsse. The long vowel ī is followed by two unstressed syllables, so it undergoes Trisyllabic Shortening to yield Cristmæsse.
And, voilà, Christmas with a short i.
The other changes in this word are relatively straightforward. The unstressed suffix on mæsse was lost towards the end of Middle Ages, yielding something like Cristmas.9 Around the same time, the t in the middle of the word fell out of the pronunciation.
This change wasn’t isolated to the word Christmas. The t also fell out in another word that had the same sequence of consonants: so the Old English word blostma ‘flower’ became the Middle English blosme, and finally, the Modern English blossom.
Clearly, Christmas is a word that has been through a lot during its sojourn in the English language. As a result, its pronunciation no longer matches its spelling particularly well. So why don’t we follow young Jimmy’s lead (and that of Lady Sussex) and change the spelling to something like Crismus?
It’s all run by an eastern syndicate
The reason that we spell Christmas in a way that makes its etymology plain is that it’s one of the few really ancient compounds whose etymology is indeed plain. Both of the elements in the compound Christmas have occurred alone (the independent words Christ and mass), even if their pronunciation in the compound has diverged from their free-standing pronunciation.
And the meaning of the compound has remained clear. The original meaning of Christmas was in no danger of being lost on the people of the Middle Ages or Early Modern period, when the spelling of English was still in flux. There was no need for a 14th-century version of Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special,10 who felt called to step up onto the stage to remind his friends, who had been going crazy for a rather commercial version of Christmas,11 what the holiday was originally about.
The word blossom, on the other hand, was not clearly related to any other word in the language. The t sound in the middle of the word could vanish without a trace left in the spelling, because it had no meaning for speakers.
Not so the t in Christmas. It had a meaning because it connected the word Christmas with the word Christ.
Medieval and Early Modern speakers of English knew very well what Christmas meant. The connection with Christ, which had been respelled with a ch, after the Latin original, was clear. By the time the spelling of English stabilized around 1700, the guardians of good taste chose to keep the Christ in Christmas, in spelling, at least.
And that is the story of how Christmas came to be such a Weird Word.
I wanted to take a moment to wish a Merry Christmas to you all and a Happy New Year! Thank you for making 2025 a lovely year on Substack. Be nice to your great-nephews (once removed) and enjoy some wassail (and if you want to have a really good time, look up the etymology of wassail). See you in 2026!
The source of the Greek word may have been the closely related (to Hebrew) language Aramaic.
The loanword Μεσσίας Messías does also appear in Greek, although (from what I can tell) more rarely than χρῑστός khrīstós.
The formula Ite, missa est can also mean ‘Go, it has been dismissed (or sent),’ where ‘it’ refers to the congregation. (Congregatio is a feminine noun, hence the feminine ending on missa. Grammatical gender is weird.)
In fact, for many speakers of English, the two sounds in ride and write are subtly different. Say them one after another and see if you’re one of them. This phenomenon is called Canadian Raising, although you don’t have to be Canadian to do it.
It makes sense that Crīst would come into Old English with a long vowel, as Chrīstus had a long vowel in Latin. In theory, anyway. At some point, Latin lost the long vs. short distinction in the spoken language, so it all depends on when exactly that happened, and who exactly transmitted the word to the Anglo-Saxons or their ancestors.
There does seem to have been a short vowel variant of the Crist word, at least at some times in some places. Some Middle English rhymes point to Crist having a short i. We also have Ormulum spellings of related words like christen with vowels that are clearly supposed to be short.
Finally, the same word Chrīstus was borrowed from Latin into other Germanic languages with short i, which is what we would expect from Latin loans of a later period, assuming that the Latin length distinction had not been preserved up to the period of the Christianization of the Germanic peoples.
These words actually came into English from French/Latin in the later Middle Ages or Early Modern Period, long after the Old English period was over. So the words weren’t themselves present in Old English, but the long vowels they used were present, and it’s easier to show this process using words we can recognize easily.
In later English, this process is called Trisyllabic Laxing, but it’s functionally the same thing.
The Old English vowel spelled a sounded like Modern English hat (at least in most North American dialects of English). But, in Middle English, it changed into a vowel, spelled a, which was more like the a you hear in Spanish or Italian.
If you haven’t seen it, do so. It’s delightful, and has a great soundtrack.
Run, in the words of Lucy, by an Eastern syndicate.
I wondered about words like divine vs divinity before, Now, I know about trisyllabic shortening for unstressed syllables, and can nod to that.
Fabulous. Thank you, and Merry Christmas!