Other forms: combined, combining, combines
To combine two things is to put them together so they work as one. Flour and water combined into dough, two classes combined into one room, a phone that combines a camera, a map and a torch.
It takes WITH, and with two activities it takes AND: combine the eggs with the sugar, combine work and study. The past form does a lot of work as an adjective — combined income, their combined weight, a combined effort by three departments. The noun is combination, which is the mix and also the numbers on a lock. And the stress matters: com-BINE is the verb, but a COM-bine is a combine harvester, the machine that cuts, threshes and cleans grain in one pass — named that because it combines jobs that once needed three machines.
1verbcombineTo put two or more things together so they make one.
“Combine the flour and the butter with your fingers.”
2verbjoinTo join with other people or groups for a shared purpose.
“The two unions combined to fight the closure.”
3nounlargeA large farm machine that harvests and threshes grain.
“A combine was working the far field until dark.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Also accepted in games: merge
Combine comes from Latin combīnō, 'to unite, to yoke together', which breaks into con- ('together') and bīnī ('two by two'). The two is still sitting inside the word: the oldest sense of combining is pairing things off. Behind bīnī stands the Proto-Indo-European word for two.
Proto-Indo-European
*dwóh₁
Latin
combīnō — unite, yoke together
Middle French
combiner
Middle English
combynyn
English, today
combine
Built from
From Middle English combynyn, from Middle French combiner, from Latin combīnō (“unite, yoke together”), from Latin con- (“together”) + bīnī (“two by two”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA