Marcel is the French form of the Latin Marcellus, a diminutive of Marcus, and so means "little warrior" or, like all Mars names, "devoted to Mars". The novelist Marcel Proust and the artist Marcel Duchamp made it a name of French culture in the 20th century. In the United States Marcel has sat quietly in the middle of the rankings for decades: number 748 in 2000, a best of number 659 in 2022 and number 731 in 2025.