Merge

How to spell merge

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce merge

What does merge mean?

1. verbTo combine or blend two or more things into a single whole.

Merge in a sentence

• The two banks plan to merge their operations next year.

• Drivers must merge carefully where the lanes narrow.

Where does merge come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Merge comes from the Latin verb mergere, which literally meant 'to dip', 'to plunge', or 'to immerse' in water. English adopted it in the early 1600s, at first in a legal and technical sense meaning to sink or absorb one thing into another so that the lesser thing disappears into the greater. From that idea of being immersed and swallowed up grew the modern sense of two things blending into a single whole, whether companies, traffic lanes, or computer files. The same Latin root surfaces in the word 'submerge', where the prefix sub- adds the sense of going under, and in 'emerge', where ex- reverses the motion and the thing comes back out. Because the spelling is so short and phonetic, the only mild trap is remembering the final silent -e that softens the g.

How the word is built

• merge (from Latin mergere: to dip, plunge, immerse)