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German honorific for an unmarried woman

Fräulein ('/f//r//ɔɪ//.//l//aɪ//n/ FROYlyne, ) is the German language honorific for unmarried women, comparable to Miss in English and [[Mademoiselle (title) in French.

Fräulein is the diminutive form of Frau, which was previously reserved only for married women. Frau is in origin the equivalent of "My lady" or "Madam", a form of address of a noblewoman. But by an ongoing process of devaluation of honorifics, it came to be used as the unmarked term for "woman" by about 1800. Therefore, Fräulein came to be interpreted as expressing a "diminutive of woman", as it were, implying that a Fräulein is not quite a woman. By the 1960s, this came to be seen as patronising by proponents of feminism, partly because there is no equivalent male diminutive, and during the 1970s and 1980s, the term Fräulein became nearly taboo in urban and official settings, while it remained an unmarked standard in many rural areas. It is seen as sexist by modern feminists. Nowadays, style guides and dictionaries recommend that all women be addressed as Frau regardless of marital status, particularly in formal situations. A newsletter published on the website of the German dictionary Duden in 2002, for instance, noted that women should only be addressed as Fräulein when they specifically request this form of address. One area in which the word still sees wide use is in the form of an admonishing address towards girls until about their mid teens, usually by a parent.