• (RP) IPA: /mɪə/
• (America) IPA: /mɪɚ/
• IPA: /ˈmɛɹi/, /ˈmɛɹɛ/

mere (plural meres)

1. (dialectal or literary) A body of standing water, such as a lake or a pond. More specifically, it can refer to a lake that is broad in relation to its depth. Also included in place names such as Windermere.
   • 1753, Michael Drayton, The Works Of Michael Drayton, esq volume 3, p. 1156:

     When making for the brook the falconer doth espy / One river plash or mere where store of fowl doth lie […]

   • 1774, Goldsmith

     The meres of Shropshire and Chesbire.

   • 1823, Sir Walter Scott

     As a tempest influences the sluggish waters of the deadest mere.

   • 1888, Annie S. Swan

     She loved.. to watch the lovely shadows in the silent depths of the placid mere.

   • 1955, William Golding, The Inheritors, Faber & Faber 2005, p. 194:

     Lok got to his feet and wandered along by the marshes towards the mere where Fa had disappeared.

mere (plural meres)

1. Boundary, limit; a boundary-marker; boundary-line.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.ix:

     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.

mere (meres, present participle mering; past and past participle mered)

1. (transitive, obsolete) To limit; bound; divide or cause division in.
2. (intransitive, obsolete) To set divisions and bounds.
3. (cartography) To decide upon the position of a boundary; to position it on a map.

• mereing

mere

1. (obsolete) Famous.

mere (comparative merer, superlative merest)

1. (obsolete) Pure, unalloyed [8^th-17^thc.].
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, III.8:

     So oft as I this history record, / My heart doth melt with meere compassion […].

   • 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 56, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes, […], book I, printed at London: By Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], OCLC 946730821 ↗:

     Meere {{transterm

2. (obsolete) Nothing less than; complete, downright [15^th-18^thc.].

   I saved a mere 10 pounds this week.

   • 1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps, OCLC 54573970 ↗, partition II, section 3, member 7:

     If every man might have what he would […] we should have another chaos in an instant, a meer confusion.

3. Just, only; no more than [from 16^thc.], pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.
   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546 ↗; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], OCLC 2666860 ↗, page 0016 ↗:

     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. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which covered the floor; […].

• French: simple
• German: bloß
• Portuguese: mero
• Russian: просто́й
• Spanish: mero

mere (plural meres)

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

     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.

1. A village in northern Cheshire.
2. A small town in southern Wiltshire.
3. a sub-municipality in East Flanders, Belgium.