Mauricio

Mauricio grows from the Latin Maurus, the word Romans gave a man from Mauretania in North Africa, and from there to anyone dark of skin. Late Latin turned Maurus into Mauritius, and Spanish rounded that into Mauricio. The short meaning holds to the root: dark-skinned, Moorish.

The most famous bearer of the older form is Saint Maurice, an officer of the Theban Legion executed around the year 287 for refusing an imperial order. His cult spread across Europe, and medieval art often painted him with African features, reading the name back into the face. The sense of "Moorish" was never a compliment or an insult by itself. It marked where a person, or an ancestor, was thought to come from.

Spanish kept the name warm while other languages cooled it into Maurice and Maurizio.

In Poland the cognate is Maurycy, and his imieniny falls on 22 September, the day a schoolteacher might read the name off a class register. Mauricio itself arrives newer, carried by Spanish and Latin American film and football. A child called Mauricio in Wrocław wears a Latin word for the far side of the Mediterranean, meaning dark-skinned.