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September 15, 2004

Guide to salutations

I came across this in the comments section of a post on Languagehat about morphology. Apparently the plural of mademoiselle is mesdemoiselles. The plural of madam is mesdames. This is the reason that, for salutations, the plural of both "Miss" and "Mrs." is "Mmes." However, (and I hadn't seen this one before), the plural of "Ms." is "Mses." or "Mss."

Similarly, the reason that the plural of "Mr." is "Messrs." is because the latter is an abbreviation for Messieurs.

I just felt the need to write all of that down, somewhere, because otherwise I'd forget it.

Posted by Dean at September 15, 2004 11:31 PM

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