Word.ws English Dictionary

merit-based

merit-based adjective: derived from one's academic or extracurricular achievements rather than one's financial need.

Adjective

merit-based

  1. Derived from one's academic or extracurricular achievements rather than one's financial need.
    • Last week, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected as “condescending” President Trump’s proposal for a more merit-based immigration policy, she provided a metaphor not just for the shattered condition of Washington’s governance of immigration, but also for the Democratic Party’s ideologically...2019 May 20, Jerry Kammer, “Pelosi's Anti-Merit Metaphor for Governance”, in Center for Immigration Studies

Questions about merit-based

What does merit-based mean?
Merit-based means derived from one's academic or extracurricular achievements rather than one's financial need.
What part of speech is merit-based?
Merit-based is an adjective.

Words near merit-based in the dictionary

  1. merit field
  2. merit fields
  3. merit good
  4. merit goods
  5. merit-badging
  6. merit-based
  7. merit-monger
  8. merit-mongers
  9. meritable
  10. Meritage
  11. Meritages

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: merit-based (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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