What is the correct way to address the recipient of a professional email, when only the last name of the person is known? Would it be more polite to say, for example "Dear Mr/s Smith" or "Dear A. Smith"
I don't have much experience writing formal emails and could really use some advice
Learn English – How does one formally address and email when the gender of the recipient is unknown
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Either 'greeting' or 'salutation' would fit.
From the online dictionary, meaning 3 is appropriate:
sal·u·ta·tion (sly-tshn) n.
- a. A polite expression of greeting or goodwill. b. salutations Greetings indicating respect and affection; regards.
- A gesture of greeting, such as a bow or kiss.
- A word or phrase of greeting used to begin a letter or message.
Your London friend is sadly misinformed. Here iss the British English only corpus from Google NGrams:
So Brits definitely stick with surname, but in the United States of America, there has been a noticeable shift towards last name in recent decades:
Probably most Anglophones have one middle name, but there are plenty of people who only have a first name and a surname. And many people have two or more of what I've never heard called anything other than middle names (first and middle names collectively are called forenames).
Over recent decades, people increasingly tend to avoid the religious implications of christian name. Somewhat surprisingly to me, it appears first name is more favoured in the United States of America than Britain, but I suppose that is more by analogy with last name than because of secularist leanings.
Forms such as given, birth, married name etc., are relatively uncommon, in that they're only normally used in contexts where they're needed to disambiguate. Usually, given name(s) are forename(s) your parents gave you at birth, if these aren't what you call yourself in later life (for whatever reason). That can also apply to birth name, but this is also used to contrast with the married name (most women still adopt their husband's surname, which may also be indicated by Mrs. Smith, née Jones).
As the charts show, second name is quite rare compared to surname (and last name in the US). Here is a link to a chart showing it is equally rare compared to first name, Christian name, and middle name. Partly because it's uncommon, it has no established unambiguous definition. Here is a typical online entry:
second name (second names, plural) Someone's second name is their family name, or the name that comes after their first name and before their family name.
(where family name is just a somewhat less common alternative to surname).
Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (4th edition) © 2003
And a "real" dictionary (such as the Oxford English Dictionary) does not even bother to define such a vague collocation. As various comments indicate, it could also mean a nickname, stagename, alias, nom-de-plume, etc. In fact, to different people in different times and places, second name can mean just about any name or part of a name that's not the first name. It is no more meaningful than other name outside of context (personally I think it sounds a bit childish and uneducated, but that's just me! :).
Best Answer
The late great William Safire answered this question in 1989. His recommendation:
William Safire, The Mulvihill Perplexity (On Language), 25 June 1989, New York Times.