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

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 this as the most important reason, with one exception. The youngest group in 2021 (under 25) had showing affection as the second most cited reason, with reasons that I have grouped together as maintaining relationships or being polite being mentioned more.

It looks as though there has been a shift in the meaning of the x for the youngest group, with it being replaced with other means of showing affection. Several younger people mentioned using a heart or kissing emoji instead.

Using the x to appear friendly, because the other person sent them, to be polite or avoid upsetting someone, comes second to showing affection for most groups in both surveys. Lots of people in all age groups made explicit reference to using them if the other person did, even if they would never use them otherwise.

The use of the x to give additional information about how the message should be interpreted came third. This is the kind of function that is often performed by things like font size, capitals, underlining and also by a lot of emoji use.

There were relatively few positive responses to the questions asking if people use the x to indicate the end of a message/turn or the end of a conversation and yet this was mentioned much more in the free comments. It appears that, while people are aware that they would only use it in this position, they don't consider its function to indicate this ending.

Another interesting difference that I noted is that, while males in both surveys were more likely to use it to show affection to a significant other, females were equally likely to use it to show affection to a friend in 2014 and were more likely to use it for friends than for significant others in 2021.

Other reasons that were mentioned in the comments, not covered by the questions, included using it to flirt, just putting it out of habit and using it sarcastically, ironically or in a passive-aggressive way. These last reasons were mentioned slightly more in 2021 and mostly by the younger groups in both surveys.

I'll end with a comment from the 2014 survey which gives a nice summary of points made by many people: