X

The grapheme and symbolxhas been documented as relatively indeterminate and polysemic (e.g.Gale, 2015). Yet, various typographic, orthographic and other design choices make it particularly salient in the contemporary semiotic landscape. The paper starts by outlining briefly the history of the changing uses and associations ofxin different areas of social life. This is followed by discussion of the typographic and orthographic salience ofx, emphasizing its unique, unsettling, and ‘foreignizing’ effect on displayed language. The paper concludes by linking the salience ofxwith a global verbal-visual register that I have called ‘globalese’ (Jaworski, 2015a), and by briefly pointing to its origins in the typographic experiments of avant-garde art.