mellay

Noun

melee (countable and uncountable, plural melees)

1. (especially) A battle fought at close range, (especially) one not involving ranged weapons; hand-to-hand combat; brawling.
   • Honestly, a lot of what this episode did right had more to do with the scenes that surrounded the enormous melee than those hyper-edited clashes of swords.2019 April 28, Alex McLevy, “Game Of Thrones Suffers the Fog of War in the Battle against the Dead (Newbies)”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 31 May 2021
2. A loud, confused or tumultuous fight, argument or scrap.
   • The ball did not appear to cross the line, a view supported by television replays as Blues captain John Terry also joined the melee, but referee Atkinson awarded the goal - to the obvious anger of Spurs and their management team.2012 April 15, Phil McNulty, “Tottenham 1-5 Chelsea”, in BBC
3. Any confused, disorganised, disordered or chaotic situation.
   • Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little.2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings...
4. Lively contention or debate, skirmish.
5. (historical) A cavalry exercise in which two groups of riders try to cut paper plumes off the helmets of their opponents, the contest continuing until no member of one group retains his plume.
6. Small cut and polished gemstones sold in lots.

See all 9 meanings of melee