Mak is the thirteenth of the nineteen periods of the Haab, the 365-day Maya solar calendar. Recorded here by its Yucatec name, Mak, glossed as enclosed or covered, the month is known from the colonial sources and, in its glyphic form, from the Classic inscriptions. Like each of the eighteen full months it counts twenty days, and a Maya date names a day by its position within the month alongside the interlocking Tzolk'in day sign and number. These are the features of the Maya solar calendar, built of eighteen twenty-day months and a closing five-day period. Together with the 260-day sacred count it forms the two-cycle system the Maya used to locate every day, the paired Tzolk'in and Haab date repeating only across the fifty-two-year span of the Calendar Round.
Mak, the thirteenth month, is generally translated as enclosed or covered, a reading epigraphers connect to a described rite involving the ceremonial extinguishing and rekindling of fire, recorded by Diego de Landa as taking place around this part of the ritual year and involving elderly participants pouring water on a new fire before it was ceremonially relit, a renewal rite structurally comparable, though not identical in mechanics or meaning, to the much later and unrelated Aztec New Fire Ceremony marking the completion of their own fifty-two-year Calendar Round binding. Whether Mak's name derives specifically from the covering or enclosing of the fire, or from an unrelated sense of the same root, is not settled with certainty from the surviving colonial and epigraphic sources.