Word.ws English Dictionary

mere

/mɪə̯/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/mɪː/

mere adjective: just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected. Also the alternative form of mayor and mair.

Adjective

mere (comparative merer, superlative merest)

  1. Just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.
    • The mere thought of pineapple on pizza makes me want to throw up.
    • The mere suggestion that the queen’s brother tried to kill your boy would be considered treason.
    Synonyms:
    alone, bare, simple, only, very
  2. (obsolete) Pure, unalloyed .
    • So oft as I this history record, / My heart doth melt with meere compassion[…].1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto VIII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • Meere [translating pure] ignorance, and wholy relying on others, was verily more profitable and wiser, than is this verball, and vaine knowledge[…].1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 56, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC
  3. (obsolete) Nothing less than; complete, downright .
    • If every man might have what he would[…]we should have another chaos in an instant, a meer confusion.1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, →OCLC, partition II...
    • This freedom of expostulation exalted his mother's ire to meer frenzy […].1751, [Tobias] Smollett, chapter 35, in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle […], volume I, London: Harrison and Co., […], →OCLC

Noun (1)

mere (plural meres)

  1. Boundary, limit; a boundary-marker; boundary-line.
    • 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.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Verb

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

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

Noun (2)

mere (plural meres)

  1. (obsolete) Synonym of sea, a large body of salt water.
    Synonyms:
    sea
  2. (obsolete) Synonym of inlet, an arm of the sea.
    Synonyms:
    inlet
  3. (UK, dialectal, literary) A body of standing water, inclusive of lakes, ponds, and pools, especially any broad and shallow one.
    • When making for the Brooke, the Falkoner doth espie
      On River, Plash, or Mere, where store of Fowle doth lye:1622, Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, song 20 p. 16
    • The meres of Shropshire and Cheshire.1791, Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature. […], new edition, volume (please specify |volume=I to VIII), London: […] F[rancis] Wingrave, successor to Mr. [John] Nourse, […]...
  4. (UK, dialectal) Synonym of marsh.
    • Cully Barnaby: Right to roam, Dad. She has got a point.
      DCI Tom Barnaby: But it's a mere. Who'd want to walk across a mere?1999 September 12, Anthony Horowitz et al., “Dead Man's Eleven”, in Midsomer Murders
    Synonyms:
    marsh

Noun (3)

mere (plural meres)

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

Proper noun capitalized: Mere

Mere

  1. A village and civil parish in northern Cheshire East district, Cheshire, England (OS grid ref SJ7381).
  2. A small town and civil parish with a town council in south-west Wiltshire, England (OS grid ref ST8132).
  3. A sub-municipality in East Flanders, Belgium.

Also used as

mere is also the alternative form of mayor and mair.

Examples of mere in a sentence

  • 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.1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, →OCLC; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The...
  • ...And ocean salinity, of course, represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance.2003, Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything: Black Swan, page 23:
  • 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.2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion:
  • Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse.2012 March, Brian Hayes, “Pixels or Perish”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 106:

All 40 example sentences with mere

Synonyms of mere

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of mere

Forms of mere

Adjective
comparativemerer
superlativemerest
Noun
pluralmeres
alternative formmeer
alternative formmeere
alternative formmear
alternative formmeare
alternative formmar
Verb
third-person singular presentmeres
present participlemering
past participlemered
pastmered

Origin of mere

From Middle English mere, mer, from Anglo-Norman meer, from Old French mier, from Latin merus (“pure, unmixed, undiluted”), from Proto-Indo-European *mer- (“to sparkle, gleam”). Cognate with Old English āmerian, āmyrian (“to purify, examine, revise”). The Middle English word was perhaps influenced by or conflated with sound-alike Middle English mere (“glorious, noble, splendid, fine, pure”), from Old English mǣre (“famous, great, excellent, sublime, splendid, pure, sterling”), from Proto-West Germanic *mārī, from Proto-Germanic *mērijaz.

From Middle English mere, from Old English mǣre, ġemǣre (“boundary; limit”), from Proto-Germanic *mairiją (“boundary”), from Proto-Indo-European *mey- (“to fence”). Cognate with Dutch meer (“a limit, boundary”), Icelandic mærr (“borderland”), Swedish landamäre (“border, borderline, boundary”).

From Middle English mere, from Old English mere (“lake, pool,” in compounds and poetry “sea”), from Proto-West Germanic *mari (“sea”), from Proto-Germanic *mari, from Proto-Indo-European *móri. Cognate with West Frisian mar, 'lake', Dutch meer, 'lake', Low German Meer, and German Meer, 'sea'. Non-Germanic cognates include Latin mare, Breton mor, and Russian мо́ре (móre). Doublet of maar and mare (“a large, dark plain; a lake on Titan”).

Words formed from mere

Phrases with mere

Words that rhyme with mere

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about mere

What does mere mean?
Mere means just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.
How do you use mere in a sentence?
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.
What part of speech is mere?
Mere can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce mere?
Mere is pronounced /mɪə̯/ (UK).

Words near mere in the dictionary

  1. merdivorous
  2. Merdoch
  3. merdog
  4. merdogs
  5. merdurinous
  6. mere
  7. mere exposure effect
  8. mere exposure effects
  9. mere mortal
  10. mere mortals
  11. mere pool

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mere (page history and authors); Mere (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-mere.ogg, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-mere.wav.

Cite this entry: “mere.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mere. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.