mark

The root mark comes from Proto-Germanic markō, which meant a boundary — the edge where one tribe's land ended and another's began. In an age before fences and surveys, you marked that edge with something you could see: a carved stone, a notched tree, a heap of rocks. So the very first 'mark' was a physical sign planted on a border.

From that single image, the word spread outward along two lines: the boundary itself, and the sign that showed it.

The sign-line is where modern English mostly lives:

- mark — any visible impression. A pen leaves a mark; a wound leaves a mark; an examiner puts a mark (a score) on your paper; an archer aims at a mark (the target). All of these are 'a sign you can see and point to.'
- re- (again, intently) + mark → remark: literally to mark again, i.e. to notice something and then say it aloud. When something catches your eye and you 'put a mark on it' in conversation, you remark on it.
- remarkable — worth marking. If a thing deserves to be pointed at and commented on, it stands out from the ordinary: extraordinary, striking.
- marked — bearing a mark, and so clearly visible: a marked improvement is one you can plainly point to.
- land + mark → landmark: originally the boundary stone itself (a mark in the land), then any prominent feature you steer by, then a turning point in time — a landmark ruling.
- trade + mark → trademark: the mark a maker stamps on goods so buyers know who made them; figuratively, anyone's signature trait.

The boundary-line meaning is fainter in English but left two famous relatives. march (a borderland, then 'to advance along/toward a border') and margin (the edge of a page or field) both trace to the same Germanic 'border' idea — the edge, the rim, the frontier.

Note one impostor: market looks like it belongs here but does not — it comes from Latin mercātus (trade), unrelated to Germanic markō. Same spelling, different family.

Greek and Latin had their own 'sign' roots — Latin signum gives us sign, signal, signature, design. mark and sign mean almost the same thing but come from completely different languages: mark is the homegrown Germanic word, sign the borrowed Latin one. The pattern to remember: every mark word goes back to a visible sign first set up on a border.