[dburn]

Walddk, on Mar 5 2009, 05:00 AM, said:

I found this descriptive information on the net:

"Mrs." is an abbreviation for Misses and is used to denote a married woman.

Miss is not an abbreviation and, therefore, should never have a period after it. It is used to denote an unmarried woman.

"Ms" is also not an abbreviation...

Fascinating. Presumably the author of this "descriptive information" believes that a married woman has missed or will miss the good things in life, and that her title should reflect those misses.

"Mrs" is an abbreviation for "mistress", the woman in charge of a household. The Oxford English Dictionary remarks that:

OED said:

In the latter half of the 17th century there was a general tendency to confine the use of written abbreviations to words of inferior syntactical importance, such as prefixed titles. The form Mrs. for mistress therefore fell into disuse except when prefixed to a name; and in this position the writing of the full form gradually became unusual. The contracted pronunciation became, for the prefixed title, first a permitted colloquial licence, and ultimately the only allowable pronunciation. When this stage was reached, Mrs. (with the contracted pronunciation) became a distinct word from mistress.

The form "missus" originated purely as a spoken word, but was of course later adopted as part of written vocabulary; the form "misses" did occur, but was rare. The former is now used only jocularly, the latter not at all.

"Miss" is also an abbreviation for "mistress", and was in former days used thus: the wife of Mr [an abbreviation for "master"] Hinden was Mrs Hinden; her eldest daughter was simply Miss Hinden, and her younger daughters were Miss X Hinden, Miss Y Hinden and so forth.

"Ms", the reader who has followed me diligently until now will not be surprised to hear, is also an abbreviation for "mistress"; it was used occasionally until the 18th century as an alternative to "Mrs".

As to punctuation: when letters are omitted from the end of a word, it is common practice nowadays to denote this by a period; when letters are omitted from the middle of a word, an apostrophe is generally used. However, when the forms "Mr" and "Mrs" were first adopted in written use, they were not punctuated at all (there was very much less punctuation around in the 17th century than there is now), and the use of "Mr." and "Mrs." is a modern anomaly for which there appears no good reason.