• gnutrino@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Xenon? Xylem? Xenobiology? Xanthoma? Xylocarp? Xiphoid? Xerosis? Xyster? The scrabble favorites xi and xu?

    There’s loads of cool words that begin with x

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Xylophone: fun, colorful, easy for a kid to remember as a cute little instrument

      Xenon: An inert gas used in… MRI scans, I think?

      X-ray is probably the only other ‘X’ word with more real-world representation than xylophone, and as pointed out above, that’s not quite representative of how the letter is used phonetically in the rest of the language.

      • gnutrino@programming.dev
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        4 months ago

        Xylem is a mojor component of almost all the plants you see. I’m not sure how much more real-world representation you can get…

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          By “real-world representation”, I mean “how often the word is actually used in the real world.” There are hundreds of trillions of neutrinos passing through you all the time, but I’d still think “nest” is a better word for kids.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        It’s rarely used phonetically the same as xylophone. Usually it makes the [ks] sound, it only ever makes the [z] sound at the beginning of words. X-ray is actually much more in line with the typical phonetic representation in English.