March comes from the Latin Martius, named after Mars—the Roman god of war. In the original Roman calendar, March was the first month of the year, and the month when military campaigns resumed after winter. The Romans honored their war god by placing him at the head of the calendar—a choice that made political sense in a militarized empire but makes no sense in a global language today.
March is one of the shorter month-names in English, which has helped it survive with less complaint than January or February. But brevity is not the same as logic. March is still an opaque label with no internal connection to the number three. A learner who encounters March for the first time gains no information about its position in the year.
The word has also accumulated a confusing secondary meaning in English: to march, the verb for walking in formation. This is a coincidence—it comes from a different root entirely, the Old French marchier—but it adds noise to the mental dictionary. A word that already carries a calendar function does not need to share its form with a common verb.
The Roman calendar once began here, in March. That is why the later months (September through December) are numbered from seven to ten—they were the seventh through tenth months in the original system. When January and February were added, the numbering became wrong, and it has stayed wrong for over two thousand years. March marks the spot where the old calendar broke, and the new one never fixed it.
Our Recommendation: Month Three. War belongs in history. Numbers belong in calendars.