High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The voiceless velar fricative, informally known as the hard ch, is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is x, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is x. The [x] sound was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English.