Women’s March in Washington, DC, 21 January 2017
27 January 2025
March has many different meanings; the Oxford English Dictionary has six different entries for march as a noun and two as a verb. But the sense considered here is that of walking or moving forward.
The word first appears in English in the fifteenth century as a verb meaning to walk in step and in time, to move as a military unit. It’s first known appearance in English is in Henry Loverich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, written c. 1410, where Loverich writes of the war between the King Lambor and the King Varlans:
It happede he hadde An Olde Cosin,
and vppon him Marchede, & was Sarrasyn,
but that Cristened nowe he was;
and to-Gederis sore werreden In eche plas.
(It happened that he had an old cousin, and he marched against him, and he had been a Saracen, but he now was christened; and they warred greatly with each other in every place.)
It, like many new words of the late Middle Ages, comes into English from French, which had a verb marcher, originally meaning to trample, but coming to mean to walk. The French verb has cognates in many different Romance and Germanic languages, and march’s ultimate origin is unknown. The two leading hypotheses are that it either comes from an Old High German verb marchon, meaning to mark (Old English had a cognate verb mearcian which gives us our modern to mark), or that it comes from the Latin marcus meaning hammer (the trample sense being key here).
The noun march, meaning an act of marching, comes down the pike by the year 1575. It appears in George Gascoigne’s poem The Fruites of Warre from that year:
If drummes once sounde a lustie martch in deede,
Then farewell bookes, for he will trudge with speede.
March as the name of a musical genre dates to at least 1588, and the metaphorical march, referring to steady and continuous progress, as in the phrase the march of time, appears by 1589 as a verb and by 1625 as a noun. George Puttenham writes of the need to use different styles for different subjects in his 1589 The Arte of English Poesie:
Finally the base things to be holden within their teder, by a low, myld, and simple maner of vtterance, creeping rather than clyming, and marching rather than mounting vpwardes, with the wings of stately subjects and stile.
Playwright John Fletcher includes these lines in his 1619 The Humorous Lieutenant:
2 Gent[leman]. Bewailing Sir a Souldier,
And one I think, your Grace will grieve to part with,
But every living thing——
Dem[etrius]. ’Tis true, must perish,
Our lives are but our Martches to our Graves.
Of course, nowadays not all marches are military. Protesters are fond of marching for or against various causes, but the use of the word in this context relatively new. In 1908, various groups of unemployed workers staged “hunger marches” on and in London demanding jobs. Many of these workers were veterans of the Boer War and some groups were extremely well organized, marshaled, and led by “sergeants,” marching in formation, and accompanied by ambulances, bands, and the like. And so the protest march was born. Many subsequent protesters have used the word march, but few have been as militaristic in organization and demeanor as their 1908 inspiration. And of course, the irony in modern anti-war protesters using a military tactic to stop a war is noteworthy.
Sources:
Fletcher, John. The Humorous Lieutenant (1619). London: H.N., 1697, 3.5, 33–34. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Gascoigne, George. “The Fruites of Warre.” In The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, vol. 1. John W. Cunliffe, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907, L’envoié, 183. International Robin Hood Bibliography.
Kempe, Dorothy, ed. The Legend of the Holy Grail. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 95. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1905, 336, lines 55.413–16. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2000, s.v. march, v.2, march, n.5.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, marchen, v.(2).
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. London: Richard Field, 1589, 126–127. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Photo credit: Mobilus in Mobili, 21 January 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
