Marc

Derived from the Latin Marcus by way of Mars, the Roman god of war, Marc developed as the primary French and Catalan spelling. It entered American birth records in 1901 as an infrequent alternative to the conventional English Mark. Parents in the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties adopted the name in growing numbers, choosing the continental final consonant over the traditional Germanic ending.

A Marc tends to be pictured holding a clipboard and maintaining an unbending insistence on spelling his name aloud before anyone asks. The name reads as slightly more deliberate than Mark, hinting at parents who owned French paperbacks around 1970. Today, the average bearer is forty-nine years old and holds an established desk in project coordination. He has spent four decades watching receptionists pause over a keyboard with an expectant index finger.