Is there a gender neutral equivalent to mister/miss?
It's fairly common to abbreviate mister/misses/miss as Mr./Mrs./Ms. and I've seen a few people online using Mx. as a gender neutral alternative. Is there a full word that one could use in this case?
For example, if I saw this printed sentence
This is Mrs. Smith
I would read it aloud as
This is Misses Smith
How would one read aloud the sentence
This is Mx. Smith
Solution 1:
Apparently that title is pronounced like the word mix or like the word mucks.
Pronounced to sound like mix or mux, the title Mx. (which, like other honorifics, is styled without the period in British English) is used increasingly on various official forms in the UK, including driver's licenses and banking documents.
"A Gender-Neutral Honorific: Mx: Words We're Watching". Merriam-Webster
I say "apparently" because I've never heard anyone say this. For what it's worth, I also can't recall ever having seen it written - except in essays or news stories about the title.
Merriam-Webster continues:
Although the earliest print evidence of Mx. is from a 1977 issue of an American magazine called Single Parent, the title has not seen much official or published use in the US. It did, however, appear twice recently in The New York Times: a June 4th article noted Mx. as someone's preferred honorific, and a June 5th article all about Mx. made it clear that the June 4th use was an exception. The title simply isn't familiar enough to the newspaper's readers to be fully adopted.
It's not clear whether or when Mx. will catch on in the US. The timeline for such developments can be long, as the title Ms. taught us not all that long ago. Coined in 1901, the now-commonplace Ms. wasn't fully adopted by The New York Times until 1986. Mx. seems to be moving more rapidly—it was added to Merriam-Webster Unabridged in April 2016.
So, this is a word that, as you say, "could" be used. But you may find that your audience does not understand you when you say "mix Jones."