The MVC design describes a set of design patterns that aim to separate the concerns of a user interface from the application logic that semantically binds them. The Model describes the business logic. The View denotes the presentation—the abstract surface that the user senses and also interacts with. The Controller denotes the component that handles the interaction between the model and view. The original idea of MVC stemmed from Trygve Reenskaug, who introduced the concept in the Smalltalk programming language during the 1970s. The pattern was subsequently implemented and popularized in the Smalltalk-80 before it was adopted in the wider software engineering community. MVC is famous for its ideas about the division of labor and the separation of responsibilities between the components.
We call it MVC patterns because the plural term describes a set of related derivatives of the classic pattern as group patterns.