Language Matters | Doxxing: the powerful ‘weapon’ in the Hong Kong protests had a petty beginning

“Doxxing” – the term and the practice – has come to be widely used in the context of the ongoing Hong Kong protests, where protesters, journalists, police officers and trolls have had their personal information revealed online without consent. “Dox” comes from “docs”, the clipped form of “documents”.

The word “dox” was initially used by early computer hackers involved in pirated software distribution to describe documents relating to new updates, cracks or patches. It then came to be used, with the form developing into the gerund “doxxing” (as well as the conjugatable verb, as in “doxxes”, “doxxed”), to refer to the act of publicly disclosing an individual’s personal information online.

This relates to the fact that it was the sourcing of documents, and the personal information found therein, that would be used to reveal an anonymous person’s identity. Back in the 1990s, “doxxing”, or “dropping dox” as it was phrased then, was mostly a petty act of retribution on Usenet during flame wars; victims were hackers and posters who got into arguments online.

The word has been spelt “doxing” since the outset, with “doxxing” making a modest appearance around late 2014 (and, according to some authorities, remaining the minority form – though is the preferred spelling in the Hong Kong context). In English spelling, in general, a single final consonant of a verb is doubled when a suffix beginning with a vowel is added – for example, “running”, “jotting”, “lobbing” – but not when the verb’s final consonant is an “x” (or “w” or “y”), as in “faxing”, “mixing”, “outfoxing”. “Doxxing” thus seems to be a marked choice (unless one assumes the alternative spelling of the base form as “doxx”).

One “x” or two, a cross should be put through this toxic and endangering practice.