merger
Pluralmergers
- 1The legal joining of two or more corporations into a single entity, with the buying party usually taking on the assets and liabilities.
Shareholders voted to approve the merger between the two airlines.
Regulators blocked the proposed merger on antitrust grounds.
Similaramalgamation, consolidation, combination
Note
Business reporting leans on a small set of collocations: merger discussions, proposed mergers, a merger called off. Juliana Liu and Junko Ogura's 2025 report on Nissan and Honda uses them this way. Strictly, one corporation survives and takes on the other's assets and liabilities. The absorbed company ceases to exist as a separate legal person, so the deal is rarely a union of equals.
- 2The joining of two or more parts so that they form one whole.
The merger of the two departments simplified the company's reporting structure.
The engineers planned a careful merger of the old and new code into one system.
Similarcombination, consolidation, amalgamation, integration, union
Oppositeseparation, split
Note
Behind the act-noun lies Anglo-Norman, where merger was a verb put to use as a noun. That is why it ends in -er without meaning "one who merges." The borrowed word takes ordinary plurals, as in club mergers that cut the number of teams by half. It is the general frame from which the corporate union, the legal sense and the sound-change sense all narrow.
- 3The absorption of one or more estates or contracts into another held by the same owner, or of several counts of accusation into a single judgment.
When the tenant bought the building, the merger of the lease into the freehold ended the tenancy.
The judge ordered the merger of the lesser charge into the more serious one.
Similarabsorption
Note
Lawyers speak of a doctrine of merger. When a lesser interest and a greater one vest in the same person with nothing between them, the lesser is extinguished, as when a lease is swallowed by the freehold. The word also covers criminal procedure, where several counts are folded into one judgment. In both uses, one thing disappears into another rather than joining it.
- 4A kind of sound change in which two or more distinct sounds combine into a single sound.
The cot–caught merger has spread across much of North American English.
Speakers who have undergone the merger pronounce the two vowels identically.
Oppositesplit
Note
Linguists name each merger after a pair of words that used to sound different. In the cot–caught merger, those two words came to be pronounced alike. What is lost is a contrast between phonemes, so a speaker who has the merger cannot reliably hear the old difference, even in careful speech.
- 5A person or thing that merges, bringing two or more things together into a single unit.
An aggressive merger forced his way into the lane without signaling.
The software acts as a merger, blending two databases into a single file.
Note
An agent noun built in English from merge plus -er. It is a different word in origin from the other senses, which come from Anglo-Norman. It names whoever or whatever does the merging, such as a driver cutting into a lane or a program combining files. When the act itself is meant, the act of merging is the word at work, and context usually tells the two apart.
Practice
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Origins
Formed from the verb "merge" combined with the suffix "-er".
From Anglo-Norman "merger", a verb that was used as a noun.