Jan Freeman, “Elusive ‘Ms.’ May Be a Mass. Invention” (Boston Globe The Word blog, June 23, 2009).
Ben Zimmer, who has been on the lookout for early uses of Ms for several years, has found what may be the first proposal for the all-purpose female honorific — in a 1901 edition of the Springfield Republican newspaper. Zimmer, executive producer of the language website Visual Thesaurus, reports the discovery today in his Word Routes column.
Read the rest here.