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Education Plus
Why has ‘missus’ been abbreviated to ‘Mrs’?
(V. Padmaja, Pune)
A title like ‘Dr’ is called an honorific. We get the abbreviated form of such words by putting together the first and last letters of the word. For example, ‘mister’ is abbreviated to ‘Mr.’ because ‘m’ and ‘r’ are the first and last letters of the word. Similarly, ‘doctor’ is reduced to ‘Dr’. The same logic, however, doesn’t seem to apply to the honorific ‘missus’. There is an ‘r’ in the abbreviated form of the word which doesn’t exist in the actual word. This is because ‘Mrs’ is not the contracted form of ‘missus’, but ‘mistress’! Therefore when you introduce someone as ‘Mrs X’, what you mean is that she is the mistress of Mr. X. Before you have a fit, let me quickly add that several hundred years ago, ‘mistress’ was used to refer to both married and unmarried women. With the passage of time, the word was mostly used to refer to someone who was married. The word took on the meaning ‘kept woman’ much later.
S. UPENDRAN
upendrankye@gmail.com
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