Adverbs That Start With X

There are no adverbs that start with X

This page is empty on purpose. Princeton WordNet, the lexical database behind every word list on this site, records 3,736 single-word adverbs, and not one of them begins with X — not at the common end, not in the rare tail, not among the multi-word entries that the other pages exclude. Every other letter of the alphabet has at least a handful. X has zero.

That is a real fact about English rather than a gap in the data, and it is worth saying plainly because the search results for this question are full of pages that answer it differently. If a list offers you a dozen everyday adverbs starting with X, it has either invented them, borrowed proper nouns, or padded the page with words that are not adverbs at all. The useful answer to “adverbs that start with X” is that there aren't any, followed by what you can use instead.

Why the letter comes up empty

English builds most of its adverbs by adding -ly to an adjective, so a letter's adverbs are largely inherited from its adjectives. X barely has any adjectives to inherit from. WordNet lists 53 entries under X in its adjective file, and the large majority are Roman numerals — xc, xci, xcii and so on — leaving only a small handful of genuine words: xanthous, xenogeneic, xenophobic, xeric, xerographic and xerophytic. Each of those is technical, and none has produced an adverb common enough to enter the dictionary.

You can certainly form one. “Xenophobically” and “xerographically” are well-formed English words that a reader would understand immediately, and nothing stops you writing them. They simply are not listed as headwords in WordNet, which is why they are not on this page: the standard applied to every letter here is that a word has to exist in the source database, and applying a looser standard just for X in order to fill the page is exactly the padding described above. Words starting with X in English are overwhelmingly Greek-derived technical terms and a few borrowings, and the letter is the second-rarest in ordinary text.

What to use instead

If you need an X word rather than specifically an X adverb, the other lists on this site do have entries under the letter: there are nouns starting with X — xylophone, xenon, x-ray — and adjectives starting with X, along with animals and foods. Those pages are thin too, and they say so, but they are not empty.

If you specifically need an adverb and the letter is a constraint you set yourself — for an alphabet book, a themed piece of writing, a game — the usual approach is to allow a word whose X is not the first letter, or to use one of the derived forms above and accept that it is a coinage rather than a dictionary word. If the constraint comes from a puzzle, it is worth checking whether the puzzle really wants an adverb, because a great many that seem to ask for one accept any X word.

Why is it free?

This page is static: it was generated from WordNet along with the other twenty-five letters and does not call a model, store anything, or talk to a server when you load it. There is nothing to upload, nothing to sign up for, and no paywall — including on the page that tells you the answer is nothing, which is the answer a paywalled version would be least worth paying for.