mere

Alternative forms

• meer, meere, mear

Noun

mere (plural meres)

1. (obsolete) A sea.
   • 1460-1500, The Towneley Playsː

     I see that it is good; now make we man to our likeness, that shall be keeper of mere & leas(ow), of fowls and fish in flood.

2. (dialectal or literary) A body of standing water, such as a lake or a pond. More specifically, it can refer to a lake that is broad in relation to its depth. Also included in place names such as Windermere.
   • Goldsmith (1774)

     The meres of Shropshire and Chesbire.

   • Sir Walter Scott (1823)

     As a tempest influences the sluggish waters of the deadest mere.

   • Annie S. Swan (1888)

     She loved.. to watch the lovely shadows in the silent depths of the placid mere.

   • 1955, William Golding, The Inheritors, Faber & Faber 2005, p. 194:

     Lok got to his feet and wandered along by the marshes towards the mere where Fa had disappeared.

   • 1753, Michael Drayton, "The Works Of Michael Drayton", esq volume 3, page 1156

     When making for the brook the falconer doth espy / One river plash or mere where store of fowl doth lie […]

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Tennyson to this entry?)

Alternative forms

• meer, meere, mear, meare

Noun

mere (plural meres)

1. boundary, limit; a boundary-marker; boundary-line
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.ix:

     The Troian Brute did first that Citie found, / And Hygate made the meare thereof by West, / And Ouert gate by North: that is the bound / Toward the land; two riuers bound the rest.

Verb

mere (third-person singular simple present meres, present participle mering, simple past and past participle mered)

1. (transitive, obsolete) To limit; bound; divide or cause division in.
2. (intransitive, obsolete) To set divisions and bounds.
3. (cartography) To decide upon the position of a boundary; to position it on a map.
   • 2016 April 1, David EM Andrews, “Merely a question of boundaries.”, in Sheetlines‎, The Charles Close Society, ISSN 0962-8207:

     What chance is there of revising this example of case law to include an exception to the generally cited rule when an administrative boundary has been mered in the past to coincide with a private property boundary?

Alternative forms

• meere, mare

Adjective

mere (comparative more mere, superlative most mere)

1. (obsolete) famous.

Adjective

mere (comparative merer, superlative merest)

1. (obsolete) Pure, unalloyed [8^th-17^thc.].
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.8:

     So oft as I this history record, / My heart doth melt with meere compassion […].

   • 1603, John Florio, transl.; Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, […], printed at London: […] Edward Blount […], OCLC 946730821:
     , I.56:

     Meere [transl. pure] ignorance, and wholy relying on others, was verily more profitable and wiser, than is this verball, and vaine knowledge […].

2. (obsolete) Nothing less than; complete, downright [15^th-18^thc.].

   I saved a mere 10 pounds this week.

   • 1621, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 216894069; The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd corrected and augmented edition, Oxford: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, 1624, OCLC 54573970, (please specify |partition=1, 2, or 3):
     , II.3.7:

     If every man might have what he would […] we should have another chaos in an instant, a meer confusion.

3. Just, only; no more than [from 16^thc.], pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.
   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., 55 Fifth Avenue, [1933], OCLC 2666860, page 0016:

     Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; […].

   • 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion:

     More than a mere source of Promethean sustenance to thwart the cold and cook one's meat, wood was quite simply mankind's first industrial and manufacturing fuel.

   • 2012 March 1, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 106:

     Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.

Noun

mere (plural meres)

1. A Maori war-club.
   • 2000, Errol Fuller, Extinct Birds, Oxford 2000, p. 41:

     As Owen prepared to dismiss the matter, Rule produced something that really caught the great man's eye – a greenstone mere, the warclub of the Maori.

Usage notes

"Mere", in the second sense, is only used with uncountable nouns. For countable nouns, use flere.

Adjective

mêre

1. greater, larger

   Antonym: minre

2. older

   Antonym: minre

Determiner

mêre

1. more

   Antonym: minre

Adverb

mêre

1. Alternative form of mêe

Noun

mēre f, n

1. lake (fresh water)
2. sea (salt water)

Descendants

• French: mère
  • Haitian Creole: mè

Declension

Derived terms

• mereswīn

Descendants

• Middle English: mere
  • English: mere
  • Scots: mere

Descendants

• Middle French: mere
  • French: mère
    • Haitian Creole: mè
• Norman: mère, méthe
• Walloon: mere