They make a link between Moor and the Latin Mauretania. So people from that region were called Moors because the region used to be called Mauritania. It might therefore be reasonable to assume that the current name of the region is derived from the same source, so Morocco=Moor-something.
However, the entry for Morocco itself says otherwise - specifically that it’s a bastardisation of Marrakesh, which comes from Arabic.
What’s up? Any ideas what the -occo segment could be?
The two etymologies are not in conflict: they describe different words.
Moor comes from the word(s) in the Romance languages that referred to the people who originated in what was, for a time, the Roman province of Mauretania and who came to be called moros, in Spanish, after they invaded/migrated to the Iberian peninsula.
Morocco comes from the the Arabic name for the city of Marrakesh, as introduced through Italian (as noted in your article). (The -cco ending would appear to be the typical habit of any people to use their own sounds (as in word endings) to make foreign sounding words more familiar. Why English borrowed the word from Italian and not Spanish, I couldn’t say, other than to note that in the period that the word first appears in English (mid-17th century), England was in a state of ongoing sporadic warfare with Spain.
We tend to expect that the words that resemble each other that identify related terms will have a common origin. While this is a reasonable epectation, it can mislead us–as happens here. It is possible, even probable, that the English association of the Moors to Morocco led to spelling similarities in English. Note, however, that in Italian, French, and Spanish, the words we translate as “Morocco” are actually Marocco, Maroc, and Marruecos, keeping a as the first vowel.
The official long and short forms of the country’s name are:
Al Mamlakah al Maghribiyah
and
Al Maghrib
(without an “o” anywhere to be found).
The French word for “Moor” (which is relevant because France colonized North Africa as the Spanish empire retreated, so Spain never actually “owned” Morocco), is Maure in which one can still see the Latin Mauretania.
And as a geographical term maghrib or maghreb usually refers to the whole of northwest Africa sheltered by the Atlas range, including most of the countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, but not Libya. Politically the Arab Maghreb Union includes Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Libya.