March

From Middle English March, Marche, borrowed from Anglo-Norman marche, from Old French marz, from Latin mensis Mārtius (“the Martian month”), from earlier Mavors.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /mɑːt͡ʃ/
• (US) enPR: märch, IPA^(key): /mɑɹt͡ʃ/

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

• Homophone: march
• Rhymes: -ɑː(ɹ)tʃ

March (usually uncountable, plural Marches)

2. The third month of the Gregorian calendar, following February and preceding April, containing the northward equinox.

   Alternative forms: Mar, Mar., MAR, 3

   Holonyms: calendar year; year

   Comeronyms: January, February, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December

   • 2025 March 29, Kristen Rogers, “Over half of US states are trying to eliminate food dyes. Here’s what you can do now”, in CNN‎^[1]:

     And on March 21, Virginia passed a law banning colorants from school food, effective July 1, 2027.

3. A surname from Middle English for someone born in March, or for someone living near a boundary (marche).
4. (uncommon) A male given name from English.
   • 2001, John Dunning, Two O'Clock, Eastern Wartime: A Novel, →ISBN, page 82:

     “Kendall told me about a man named March Flack. A radio actor who disappeared years ago. I assumed that was here.”

   • 2012, Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery, →ISBN:

     Alexander Garden Jr., the long-serving rector of South Carolina's St. Thomas parish, twice advertised in 1747 to offer a reward for the return of an enslaved Igbo man named March, who had run away from the parsonage house.

   • 2013, Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property and Power, →ISBN:

     However, Patty seems to have been the only one of more than seventy slaves at Ossabaw Island who did not perform some duty on the plantation, which is evidence that elderly and disabled slaves were indeed put to work despite their impairments. The overseer's journals for Kollock's Ossabaw Island plantation allow us to trace the career of one disabled slave, a blind man named March, to demonstrate the utility of slaves with debilities. At the time Kollack was consolidating his assets on his new plantation, March was rated to be a "quarter hand," with no indication of what jobs he was expected to perform at that time. In the 1850 and 1851 journals, March is not included in tallies of cotton pickings by weight, unlike most other male slaves [...]

   • 2016, Mary V. T. Cattan, Pilgrimage of Awakening: The Extraordinary Lives of Murray and Mary Rogers, →ISBN, page 157:

     What suited her much better was a young man named March whom she had met at a friend's wedding in London. Both Linda and March Hancock had grown up far east of Eden, [...] March Hancock was born in 1944 [...]

5. A market town and civil parish with a town council in Fenland district, Cambridgeshire, England (OS grid ref TL4196). ^[1]
6. A municipality near Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
7. An unincorporated community in Marshall County, Minnesota, United States.
8. An unincorporated community in Dallas County, Missouri, United States, named after the month.

• mid-March

• Mars

• charm

• Marche, Mersh, Mearch, Marz, Mars, Marce

From Anglo-Norman marche, from Old French mars. See English March for more.

March

1. March
   • 14th c. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. General Prologue: 1-2.

     Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
     the droghte of March hath perced to the roote

     (please add an English translation of this quotation)

   Synonym: Lyde (rare)

• English: March (see there for further descendants)
• Scots: Mairch

• “march(e, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007.