“Xylophone” and “X-ray (Fish)” are the canonical “X” words.

What words begin with X?
Very few.
X-ray and xylophone
Will do.¹

Very few words begin with X. An animal-themed alphabet book can fall back on taxonomy…²

But otherwise it’s a tricky letter. One of my kid’s alphabet books has the gumption to use “Xeric”³ for X. I can respect that. More common is for alphabet books to “cheat” by using a word that just contains X or by using X in its role as a symbol. Or they just stick with ol’ reliable “Xylophone”.

¶ What are the alternatives to “Xylophone”?

I wanted to check if there are any X-words we’re missing out on.

I started by pulling up some lists of the most common words and filtering by starting letter. This is actually a bit tricky because word frequency depends on the corpus used. The Wikipedia corpus is full of Chinese names. The Gutenberg corpus is full of Greek. The Google corpus - porn and webdev frameworks.

The Wikipedia word frequencies, pulled from this Github repo, seemed best. I used an LLM to add simple annotations and then manually but zealously pruned the results. I’ve removed abbreviations, most proper nouns, and any brand name I don’t personally recognize.

Pickings are slim.

I’ve also seperated out taxonomy terms into their own list below, but “xenopus” and “xenarthra” are the only two I’ve ever heard, and “xenopus” only because I saw it in an ABC book. (Xenarthrans are sloths, armadillos, and anteaters.)