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What do people mean when they use 'x' as a 'kiss'?

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The people who responded to our surveys in both 2014 and 2021 identified a number of different reasons they use them. They responded to a number of questions about how often they would use them for specific reasons that we devised, but there were also over 400 comments in the 2014 survey and about 150 in the 2021 survey which specifically mentioned reasons in responses to the very general question "How would you describe your use of kisses (x) in phone and/or online communication?" The various reasons addressed in the questions and mentioned in the comments can be grouped into four broad categories: showing affection, maintaining relationships/politeness, paralinguistic (indicating how the message should be read) and structural/punctuation. Comments often included more than one of these, as shown in the example below. The most cited reason is to show affection, either to a 'significant other', to a friend or to a family member. Both genders and all age groups have thi...
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Back in 2011, one of my students did a final year research project comparing the instant messaging language of her age group (21-23) and her younger brothers' age group (15-16). One of the key differences she found was that many of the younger group were putting kisses ( x ) in places other than the end of a conversation. Many were appearing at the end of every turn in a conversation and some even within turns. The older group, on the other hand, were only putting kisses at the end of a conversation when they signed off. This led me to look in more detail at the way people (especially in the UK) use the "orthographic kiss". In 2014 another student did a survey asking people a range of questions about how, when and why they use the x , in their texts, emails and instant messaging. Last year (2021) I repeated that survey to see how people's views on their (and others') use had changed. In this blog, I will post the various findings of these three studies, looking at...
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