mere

adj

1. Just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.

   “The mere thought of pineapple on pizza makes me want to throw up.”

   “The mere suggestion that the queen’s brother tried to kill your boy would be considered treason.”

   “And ſo vve may have an ever-grovving Idea of infinite Number as vvell as infinite Space or Emptineſs, yet it is a meer Idea, and hath no real Exiſtence vvithout us.”

   “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;[…].”

   “...And ocean salinity, of course, represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. I didn't know what a proton was, didn't know a quark from a quasar, didn't know how geologists could look at a layer of rock on a canyon wall and tell you how old it was, didn't know anything, really. I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted but insistent urge to know a little more about these matters and to understand above all how people figured them out.”

2. (obsolete)Pure, unalloyed .

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

   “Meere [translating pure] ignorance, and wholy relying on others, was verily more profitable and wiser, than is this verball, and vaine knowledge[…].”

3. (obsolete)Nothing less than; complete, downright .

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

   “This freedom of expostulation exalted his mother's ire to meer frenzy […].”

noun

1. Boundary, limit; a boundary-marker; boundary-line.

   “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.”

2. (dialectal, literary)A body of standing water, such as a lake or a pond (formerly even a body of seawater), especially a broad, shallow one. (Also included in place names such as Windermere.)

   “When making for the Brooke, the Falkoner doth espie On River, Plash, or Mere, where store of Fowle doth lye:”

   “The meres of Shropshire and Cheshire.”

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

   “A gloomy-gladed hollow slowly sink To westward - in the deeps whereof a mere, Round as the red eye of an Eagle-owl, Under the half-dead sunset glared”

   “[…] the salt field which extends from those old salt meres at Barton, a little south of Birkdale, and on to Preesall, near Fleetwood.”

3. (alt-of, alternative, obsolete)Alternative form of mayor and mair.
4. A Maori war-club.

   “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.”

verb

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

   “What chance is there of revising this example of case law to include an exception to the generally cited rule when an administrative boundary has been mered in the past to coincide with a private property boundary?”

name

1. A village and civil parish in northern Cheshire East district, Cheshire, England (OS grid ref SJ7381).
2. A small town and civil parish with a town council in south-west Wiltshire, England (OS grid ref ST8132).
3. A sub-municipality in East Flanders, Belgium.