Talk:M.

French

See Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/April#Messrs#French for some discussion that (along with Google Books searches for, and inspections of the French Wiktionary entries on, "Mr" and "MM." etc) led to the drafting of the French entry's usage note. - -sche (discuss) 19:57, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

RFD discussion: March–April 2020

The following information passed a request for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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M.

Latin initial of various first names. Some limited prior discussion is at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2018/December#Initials. In favour of keeping is that, in inscriptional Latin especially, there is a limited corpus of such names, and it's probably helpful to people reading the inscriptions to provide the set of possibilities. In favour of deleting is that any name can be reduced to initials, and certainly for a language like English I don't think we'd want a hundred senses at M. all citing various mentions of "M. Smith" to support "abbreviation of Michael", "abbreviation of Matthias", "abbreviation of Mark", etc, etc. I personally am on the fence and abstain for now, but thought this should be discussed, having been reminded of it by the discussion of B. markmitchelli, above. - -sche (discuss) 22:09, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Keep. Classical Latin is fundamentally unlike modern English: you cannot abbreviate any name you like with a single letter; instead, there are standard abbreviations. Sometimes those abbreviations do not even match the name, e.g. Cn. for Gnaeus. English used to do this to some degree (e.g. a George would preferentially abbreviate his name as Geo. rather than G.), but modern English usage is now a very poor benchmark for judging a very different linguistic culture. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:19, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Keep for the reasons Metaknowledge said. For English such would be to be deleted. Fay Freak (talk) 23:57, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

• RFD-kept. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:13, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

RFV discussion: July 2019–April 2021

See Talk:k#RFV discussion: July 2019–April 2021.

(plural Messrs.)

1. a.1.a The plural of monsieur, in its various uses. (When used as a prefixed title, now commonly represented, as in Fr., by the abbreviation MM.) 
2. a.2.a Used to supply the want of an English plural of Mr. (Commonly in the abbreviated form Messrs.) 
https://www.oed.com/oed2/00150777 

--Backinstadiums (talk) 09:50, 23 July 2021 (UTC)