Every female over 25 is Madame. (Better avoid spelling Madam as Madame, which is good French but in English it is often taken to mean a brothel-kepper). Despite all the criticism and barbs hurled at it, Ms is providing a partial answer to the difficulty of using Miss or Mrs.

HOW do you address a business letter to someone whose marital status as a
woman you don’t know? Or, whom still, you aren’t even sure whether the person being addressed to is a man or woman. Nowadays there are quite a few names where gender isn’t easy to decipher, such as Roop Gupta or Lakhsmi Narayan or Madhu Misra.

Certainly, many of us have at some time been confronted in writing by an ambiguous addressee’s name and had to guess at the person’s sex
-----and guessed wrongly. The matter is not helped because many women in the business and official world make it a point not to disclose their gender in correspondence (which is understandable).

With more and more woman moving into business and professions, addressing of business letters correctly can be ticklish.

One suggestion is to use the full forename-surname salutation without mentioning Mr or Ms, such as "Dear Roop Gupta." Of course, the forename-surname salutation is reserved for correspondence at more intimate levels than with perfect strangers. But this seems a sensible way out. The Katherine Gibbs Handbook of Business English permits it. "If it is not possible to determine the gender of the addressee, omit a courtesy title in the inside address and in the salutation".

What about the situation where you know that the person addressed is a female but you aren't sure about her marital status?

Faced with the difficulty between the use of Miss and Mrs, back in the 1960s, the feminists took up the word Ms, pronounced as Miz (plural Mses). Unlike Mr and Mrs, which are abbreviations, Ms has no spelled-out form.

The origin of the word again is not exactly known. Though it looks like a cross between Miss and Mrs, it's possibly derived from the word Mistress -- defined as a woman who has authority, command or ownership, especially the female head of a family, household or school. The other meaning a woman cohabiting unlawfully with a man, when the man supports her financially -- can be ignored in the present context.

Gloria Steinam, a prominent figure in the feminist movement (also one of the editors of the magazine MS), has been particularly active in advocating that women use Ms with their names. To feminists, a woman's marital status is nobody's business and so a neuter term Ms is called for. (Incidentally, Ms is not neutral in the grammatical sense, it is a carrier of feminine gender).

The word Ms is still fighting its way to widespread acceptability and use. It finds no mention in many a dictionary. The New York Times that takes care to write Mr or Mrs after people's names has not accepted Ms.

The British are even more hostile to it. "It is artificial, ugly, means nothing and is rotten English. It is faddish, middle-class plaything and far from disguising the marital status of women, as is claimed, it draws Fishlock.

Jennifer Clarkson, writing in the Punch, made fun of Ms. "Ms hardly makes a word, it hasn't even got a vowel. Only two consonants, alone together, unchaperoned." She wants "a real word with dignity and grown-upness, not "the dental drill of Mizzz". She doesn't mind being called Madam as the French do. Every female over 25 is Madame. (Better avoid spelling Madam as Madame, which is good French but in English it is often taken to mean a brothel-kepper). Despite all the criticism and barbs hurled at it, Ms is providing a partial answer to the difficulty of using Miss or Mrs.