Other forms: merged, merging, merges
To merge is for two things to become one, with the join no longer visible. Two lanes of traffic squeezing into a single lane, two lists of names becoming one list with the repeats taken out.
Companies merge, and the noun for that is a merger. Colours and sounds merge where they meet, so grey sea merges into grey sky at the horizon. Programmers merge one branch of code into another, and a merge conflict is what happens when the two versions disagree about the same line. The word takes WITH or INTO: the small bank merged with the larger one, the river merges into the estuary. Watch the difference from a takeover - merging suggests two things joining as one; if one side simply swallows the other, English calls that something else.
1verbmergeTo join together, or to join things together, into a single whole.~90%
“The two village schools merged in 2015.”
synonyms: combine, unite
2verbblendTo blend gradually so that no boundary can be seen.~4%
“The grey of the sea merged into the grey of the sky.”
3verbcombineTo combine two sets of files, records or data into one.~4%
“Merge the two spreadsheets before you send the totals.”
synonyms: combine
4verbstreamTo join a stream of moving traffic.~2%
“Traffic from the slip road merges just after the bridge.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 25 sentences found in the wild and placed 25 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: combine, unite
Merge was borrowed from Latin mergo, 'to dip, plunge, immerse, sink down into'. The same verb sits inside submerge, which kept the wet meaning while merge dried out into joining. The older English sense followed the Latin closely: to be merged was to be sunk and swallowed up.
Latin
mergō — to dip; dip in; plunge; sink down into; immerse; overwhelm
English, today
merge
Borrowed from Latin mergō (“to dip; dip in; plunge; sink down into; immerse; overwhelm”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA