Other forms: maroons, marooned
To maroon somebody is to leave them somewhere they cannot get away from — an island, a rooftop, a village behind a flooded road. It is nearly always passive: people are marooned, and whoever or whatever marooned them is the sea, the snow, or a captain who has sailed off.
The colour is the same spelling and a different word entirely: maroon is a dark brownish red, the colour of a school blazer or a chestnut, and it comes from French marron, a chestnut. Nothing links the two but chance. The verb is the commoner one in news — marooned by floods is a standard phrase — and it carries a note of helplessness that stranded does not quite have.
1verbmaroonTo leave somebody in a place they cannot get away from.
“Forty passengers were marooned at the airport overnight.”
2noundarkA dark brownish-red colour.
“The school uniform is maroon and grey.”
maroon is a way of being cut off.
Spanish cimarron meant wild or runaway, and it was used of enslaved people who escaped into the hills of the Caribbean and lived free there. English took the word, and then turned the meaning inside out: from someone who ran away to somewhere remote, to someone abandoned there by others.
Spanish
cimarrón — fugitive, wild, feral
French
marron — feral; fugitive
English, today
maroon
From French marron (“feral; fugitive”), from Spanish cimarrón (“fugitive, wild, feral”); see that entry for more.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sea & Sailing, Colours & Patterns