Christmas

How to spell christmas

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce christmas

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does christmas mean?

1. nounThe annual Christian festival and holiday on 25 December celebrating the birth of Jesus, and the wider season around it.

Christmas in a sentence

• The office closes for two weeks over christmas.

• They spent christmas with the whole family at the cottage.

Where does christmas come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English phrase Cristes maesse, which literally meant 'Christ's Mass', the church service held to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The first element, Christ, traces back through Latin Christus to the Greek khristos, meaning 'the anointed one', itself a translation of the Hebrew title 'messiah'. The second element is simply 'Mass', from Latin missa, the name for the Eucharistic service. The two words were squeezed together over the medieval period, with the spelling settling into a single word by around the 1500s. The silent 't' in the middle and the way 'mass' has worn down to '-mas' are exactly what trips writers up, since the spoken form 'KRISS-muhss' gives almost no hint of the hidden 't' or the original word 'Mass'.

How the word is built

• Christ (the anointed one, from Greek khristos)
• -mas (Mass, the church service)