Mx

The dictionary describes the word as formed inside English by compounding, from the M- of Mr, Mrs and Ms plus X, probably in the sense of an unknown or variable quantity. Wikipedia makes the same point about the letter more bluntly: the x is a wildcard and does not carry an implication of mixed gender. Merriam-Webster's entry adds the reason first given for it, that Mx was suggested in the late 1970s as a feminist word for people who did not want a title to disclose their gender, and notes that men and women still use it on those grounds.

Where the title Mx was first recorded

The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence is P. Kite, writing in the magazine Single Parent in April 1977, with a suggestion rather than a usage: that both sexes might be called Mx, which would solve the gender problem entirely. The dictionary's next citation moves the word onto the early internet. In July 1982 a contributor to the Usenet group net.nlang proposed one generic title for everyone, gave the pronunciations mix and mux, and wrote out the form Mx. John Eldridge. A 1998 post to uk.misc records somebody using the title before their own name, on the reasoning that it leaves open whether they are a woman, a man or something in between.

The dictionary's fourth citation, from 2014, is the first that describes an established user rather than a proposal: Trans Bodies, Trans Selves names the cabaret artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond, who takes the pronoun V. Nobody in the material on file is credited with coining the word, and the entry heading in the dictionary runs from 1977 with no earlier date offered.

How British institutions came to accept Mx

The adoption record is unusually well dated for a word of this kind, and it is concentrated in the United Kingdom. Brighton and Hove City Council voted in 2013 to allow Mx on council forms, which is the earliest dated decision by a public body on file. The Royal Bank of Scotland added the title as an option for customers in 2014.

Recognition widened in 2015. Wikipedia's account of that year names the Royal Mail, the government agencies responsible for documents such as driving licences, most major banks, a number of other companies and the charity Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, and records that the House of Commons confirmed it would accept the use of Mx by members of parliament. The same article lists the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs, the National Health Service and many councils, universities, insurers and utility retailers as accepting it since, and flags that particular sentence as wanting a citation.

Later dates fill in the pattern. Metro Bank became the first bank in the United Kingdom to print Mx on its forms in 2016, other banks having amended records on request before that. Banks in the HSBC Group announced the title alongside several other gender-neutral options on 30 March 2017, the day before the International Transgender Day of Visibility. In March 2021 Oscar Davies, a Non-binary barrister, became the first person to use Mx rather than Mr or Ms on the board of their chambers.

Two decisions outside Britain are on file and they run in opposite directions. In December 2020 the Provincial Court of British Columbia issued guidance asking participants introducing themselves in court to state the pronouns and courtesy title to be used for them, and named Mx among the titles they were invited to use. In 2025 federal agencies in the United States were ordered to limit or avoid a list of words and expressions that included Mx.

Which dictionaries record Mx and when

Three lexicographic dates matter and they fall close together. The Oxford English Dictionary added Mx in 2015, in the same year that the New York Times used it in an article about the Bluestockings bookshop and set off a round of comment, to which the paper's standards editor Phil Corbett later responded. The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary added it in April 2016, while the title remained uncommon in American use. Wiktionary carries the plural Mxes and a run of quotations from the New York Times between 2018 and 2024, along with the entry in the centennial edition of Emily Post's Etiquette from 2022, which pronounces it mixes and names Non-binary, Intersex and Gender-nonconforming people as its users.

The dictionary of record also measures the word. Mx runs at about 0.2 occurrences per million words in modern written English, and the Oxford English Dictionary's series for 2017 to 2025 shows the figure moving from 0.021 to 0.07, with most of the rise falling after 2021. That is a frequency count rather than a count of people.

How people who use Mx pronounce it

Pronunciation has been the standing objection to the title, and it is the reason the largest survey of it exists. The Gender Census ran three surveys on Mx, in 2014 with 118 responses, in 2016 with 505, and from 5 to 19 January 2019 with 3,204 responses of which 3,179 were usable and 579 came from the United Kingdom. The stated motive for the first was that the title kept being condemned on the grounds that nobody knew how to say it.

The 2019 answers split by country. Mix took 25.5 per cent worldwide, with 573 people choosing it, ahead of a schwa pronunciation at 9.5 per cent, uncertainty at 8 per cent, spelling the letters out at 3.9 per cent, mux at 2.7 per cent, mex at 2.3 per cent, mixter at 1.1 per cent and mixture at 0.2 per cent. Among United Kingdom participants the schwa form led with 41 per cent, which is the reverse of the worldwide order. Wikipedia reports a separate informal study from 2023 in which 68 per cent of 2,426 participants who use the title said mix and 24 per cent used the schwa. Mixter is sometimes treated as the long form, in the way that Mister is the long form of Mr.

Familiarity and sight of the word on an actual form are two different measures, and the survey collected both. The figures below are shares of the people who chose to answer a self-selected online survey promoted on Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon and Reddit, and the author noted that participants were more likely to pass it on if the title was their own.

An Australian respondent reported the title on every government form, which the survey's author connected to Australia having issued the first passport with an X gender marker, in 2011.

Why people disagree about who Mx is for

The argument recorded is about whom the title belongs to rather than whether it should exist. The 2019 survey asked directly whether Mx is gender-inclusive, meaning that anyone of any gender may claim it, or gender-exclusive, meaning a title for non-binary people in the way that Mr is broadly a title for men. The answer depended on who was asked. People whose own title is not Mx called it a non-binary title by a wide margin. People whose title is Mx called it inclusive, and over half of that group did so.

The feedback box produced two patterns the author summarised rather than quoted. One came from cisgender and binary participants who wanted a title without a gender in it but held back for fear of taking something that belonged to non-binary people. The other came from non-binary participants using Mx who wished binary people would take it up, so that the title would stop functioning as a disclosure.

The numbers on either side of that are small and they cut across the gender categories. Of participants who said they were men or boys and nothing else, 14 per cent said their title was sometimes or always Mx, and among women and girls the figure was 15 per cent. Of participants whose title is always Mx, 89 per cent had answered the gender question with neither of the binary options. Participants who chose neither option were also the group most likely to have heard of the title at all, at 94 per cent, and men and boys were the least likely. Merriam-Webster's usage note runs alongside that, recording both the feminist origin of the word and its later adoption by people who identify as non-binary, and stating that no official figures exist for the second group.