Mere

How to spell mere

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mere

What does mere mean?

1. adjectiveNothing more than what is stated; used to stress how small or unimportant something is.

Mere in a sentence

• The repair cost a mere fraction of what we expected.

• A mere glance at the spreadsheet showed the totals were wrong.

Where does mere come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The common adjective comes from the Latin merus, which literally meant 'pure', 'undiluted', or 'unmixed', the word a Roman would use for wine drunk straight without water. English picked it up in the late 1300s, at first meaning 'pure' or 'absolute', so a 'mere' truth was an unalloyed one. Over time the emphasis shifted from 'nothing but pure' to 'nothing more than', giving us the modern belittling sense, as in a mere trifle. Quite separately, the much older noun 'mere' meaning a lake or pond descends from Old English mere, a native Germanic word related to the Latin mare 'sea', which survives in place names like Windermere. Because two different roots collapsed into the same four letters, the spelling is short and deceptively simple, and the trap is mostly confusing it by ear with 'mire' or with the verb in 'merely'.

How the word is built

• mere (from Latin merus: pure, unmixed); used adjectivally to mean nothing more than