It began in academic literature about two years ago.

Inside Higher Ed reports.

Students adopt gender-nonspecific term ‘Latinx’ to be more inclusive

Anyone following the recent protests on college campuses may have noticed a word that simply didn’t exist a year or two ago — Latinx.

At Pomona College, for example, student activists demanded in a letter that their president meet with each of six “affinity groups.” Among them: “Latinx students.”

These Latinx students are the same group who would, a year ago, have been grouped under the terms “Latina,” “Latino” or, commonly, “Latino/a” (or even “Latin@”). But, in order to escape the implicit gender binary there and include all possible gender and sexual identities, the final gender-determining syllable is increasingly being replaced with an X.

And the term is quickly becoming more common. Google trend data show it began to appear in Internet searches late last year and surged suddenly in November 2015. And experts say it first began to spread in academic literature about two years ago.