marshal vs martial

The core difference

These two are unrelated words that happen to look alike, and the confusion is almost entirely one of spelling.

Marshal is a person or an action:

• A noun: a high-ranking officer (a field marshal), a law officer in the United States, or an official who directs people at an event (a race marshal, a fire marshal).
• A verb: to bring things together in order — marshal your arguments, marshal the troops, marshal support for a bill.

Martial is only ever an adjective, and it always relates to war, soldiers or fighting: martial law, martial arts, a martial bearing, martial music.

The test you can run

If you can put "warlike" or "military" in its place, use martial. Warlike law, warlike arts — clumsy, but the sense holds. If instead the word names a person or describes something being organised, use marshal.

A spelling hook: martial contains Mars, the Roman god of war. Marshal ends in -al like official, which is what a marshal is.

The mistakes that turn up most

• Marshal arts for martial arts — the arts are warlike, not organised by an official.
• Marshall law for martial law — this one is very common, doubled up with the wrong number of Ls.
• Martialled the evidence for marshalled the evidence.

Marshall with two Ls

Two Ls belongs to proper nouns only: the surname Marshall, the Marshall Islands, the Marshall Plan, a Marshall amplifier. As a common noun or verb, it is always one L in the base form: marshal, a marshal.

The inflected forms split by dialect. British English doubles the L: marshalled, marshalling. American English usually does not: marshaled, marshaling. Both are correct in their own varieties, so pick one and stay with it through a piece of writing.

The compound that catches everyone

Court-martial is a military court, and it uses the war word — because the court is martial, not because anyone is marshalling anything. Two things follow from that:

• The plural is courts-martial, not court-martials, because court is the noun and martial describes it. Court-martials does appear and is listed in some dictionaries, but courts-martial is the form expected in careful and official writing.
• It also works as a verb: he was court-martialled (British) or court-martialed (American).

One more term worth knowing: a marshalling yard is where railway wagons are sorted into trains — a literal use of the verb sense, and a good reminder of what marshal really means.