Melee

How to spell melee

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce melee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does melee mean?

1. nounA confused, disorderly fight or scuffle involving many people at close quarters.
2. nounA confused, jostling mass of people or activity.

Melee in a sentence

• Two players were sent off after the melee broke out near the goal.

• She lost sight of her children in the melee of the holiday sales.

• In the melee outside the stadium, several fans lost their phones.

• Reporters jostled in the melee to reach the visiting minister.

Where does melee come from?

Language of origin: French

This word comes straight from the French mêlée, the noun built on the verb mêler, meaning 'to mix' or 'to mingle'. That French verb descends from the Vulgar Latin misculare, a frequentative form of the Latin miscere, which simply meant 'to mix'. English borrowed mêlée in the late 1600s to describe a confused hand-to-hand fight, the idea being that the combatants were all jumbled and mixed together in close combat. The same Latin root for mixing surfaces in a whole family of relatives, including 'medley', 'mélange', 'miscellaneous', and even 'meddle', so the underlying notion of things stirred together runs through all of them. In English the accents are usually dropped to give 'melee', and that flat spelling is the trap: the doubled vowel pattern of 'ee' after a single 'l', with no obvious cue from the way it is said.

How the word is built

• mêl- (from French mêler: to mix)
• -ee (from the French past-participle ending -ée)