Brian from Lafayette, Indiana, wonders why chicken is abbreviated CHX in the restaurant industry. Using X as a substitute or shortener has a long history. Medieval scribes sometimes drew a line through the final stroke of an abbreviated word. This practice gave us Rx, from the Latin recipe, literally “to take.” Descartes used X as a placeholder variable in mathematics. Telegraph operators and broadcasts have also used X to save transmission time, resulting in WX for weather and DX for distance. The letter X also saves time for medical professionals, who use ABX for antibiotics, BX for biopsy, DX for diagnosis, FX for fracture, HX for history, PX for problems, SX for symptoms, and more. So, in the restaurant business, CHX makes similar quick work of chicken. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “X As an Abbreviation Stand-In and “CHX” in Restaurants”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, this is Brian from Lafayette, Indiana.
Hey Brian, we’re glad to have you.
What’s up?
So I work in the restaurant industry and something that one of my employees noticed is that we abbreviate chicken a lot with CHX.
And that seemed kind of weird that it’s not like CHK or CHN.
C-H-X.
So like on an order form from your suppliers, that’s how they’ll make it short.
Yep, or like even just in our own system and I’ve seen it in a lot of different food service places.
And when you think about it, do you think of it as chicks or CHX or do you pronounce it in your head?
I usually just think of it as chicken in my head.
It would make more sense if it was like a plural, but it’s not.
-huh.
Yeah, that’s a really good that’s a really that’s a little thing that we’ll bring up here in a second about that X.
All right, this is actually a really interesting question.
And I’m so happy that you’re here with this because this one abbreviation in your restaurant, CHX, as an abbreviation for chicken, goes back thousands of years.
Well, maybe not thousands, but a long time.
There’s a several different ways that X got there.
One of them is X, as you know, has been a placeholder in math, like geometry and other things for a long time.
So Descartes did it, turned X, Y and Z into these characters to use as variables or placeholder letters when the number was unknown.
And so that’s one of the ways that X has stood in for for a thing, a larger thing.
Another one of course is medicine.
We use RX to refer to medicine or for prescription.
And that X actually is originally an X.
It was the leg of the R had a line through it because this is what old scribes would do, ancient scribes would do that when they abbreviated a word they would put in a line through like the last tail or last leg of the characters that they did put on the page and that was one of the more common ones.
So it actually stands for requipe.
It means to to take.
It’s related to our word receive.
So that’s another place we got the X.
But then there’s a third one.
And the third one, it’s not altogether clear if it comes from the medical use or the geometry use, but this is in technical fields like broadcasting and in the old days in telegraphs where they would use X to make words short because obviously if you’re using a a Morse code device to send your messages you want to do as little hammering on the clicker as possible right so you’re gonna make as many words short as you can.
And X became the way to do that.
So besides RX for prescriptions or for medicine, you will sometimes see in the medical world ABX for antibiotics, BX for biopsy, I have a whole list of these.
FX for fracture, SX for symptoms, PX for problems, and then HX for history, as in the patient’s medical history, but there are a couple that overlap with the technical field.
For example, TX can mean treatment in medicine, but transmit in radio or in telegraph.
DX can mean diagnosis in medicine, but it means distance in broadcasting.
So there’s quite a few of these WX is a really common one.
You probably maybe have seen that even.
Sometimes you’ll even see that in the newspaper when they kind of relay these short form forecast WX for weather.
Oh I’ve never seen that.
I’ve definitely seen DX on you know like stereos.
Yeah there we go yeah exactly DX for stereos like well there’ll be a little switch you can flip to change the way that it receives and the power that it gives to the amplifier.
So that’s what we know.
So maybe go back to Descartes and using X as a placeholder letter for an unknown a number or a known quantity, but it might also come from shorten words because I’ve definitely seen some of the ones that you’ve mentioned, obviously like Rx and stuff like that.
Exactly.
And but that that huge history did lead to your your chicken and your your your computer system at the restaurant.
I love the idea that Descartes had money Brian, I’m so glad that you brought your job experience and this really interesting question.
I had no idea.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
All right.
We’ll fire up the grill.
We’ll be right over.
Thank you so much for your car.
Sounds good.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
What words and phrases have you run into on your job?
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