Definition of mere

"mere" in the noun sense

1. mere

a small pond of standing water

"mere" in the adjective sense

1. mere

being nothing more than specified

"a mere child"

2. bare, mere, simple

apart from anything else without additions or modifications

"only the bare facts"

"shocked by the mere idea"

"the simple passage of time was enough"

"the simple truth"

Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)

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Quotations for mere

Everything is mere opinion. [ Marcus Antoninus ]

Mere wishes are silly fishes. [ Proverb ]

He that's a blab is a mere scab. [ Proverb ]

Mere idleness can have no excuse. [ Proverb ]

Authority intoxicates,
And makes mere sots of magistrates;
The fumes of it invade the brain.
And make men giddy, proud and vain;
By this the fool commands the wise;
The noble with the base complies;
The sot assumes the role of wit.
And cowards make the base submit. [ Butler ]

Sorrow is the mere rust of the soul.
Activity will cleanse and brighten it. [ Johnson ]

The mere aspiration is partial realization. [ Anna Cora Mowatt ]

May that soldier a mere recreant prove
That means not, hath not, or is not in love! [ William Shakespeare ]

Purposing without performing is mere fooling. [ Proverb ]

A mere scholar at court is an ass among apes. [ Proverb ]

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness. [ Addison ]

Luck, mere luck, may make even madness wisdom. [ Douglas Jerrold ]

The noisy drum hath nothing in it, but mere air. [ Proverb ]

Those dreams, that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shades our minds delude,
Jove never sends us downward from the skies;
Nor can they from infernal mansions rise;
But are all mere productions of the brain,
And fools consult interpreters in vain. [ Swift ]

There are things
Which make revenge a virtue by reflection,
And not an impulse of mere anger; though
The laws sleep, justice wakes, and injured souls
Oft do a public right with private wrong. [ Byron ]

Existence is not to be measured by mere duration. [ Caird ]

A mere madness to live like a wretch and die rich. [ Burton ]

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart. [ William Shakespeare ]

Beauty, devoid of grace, is a mere hook without the bait. [ Talleyrand ]

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! [ Robert Browning ]

How many unjust and wicked things are done from mere habit. [ Terence ]

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility. [ Amiel ]

My dame fed her hens with mere thanks, and they laid no eggs. [ Proverb ]

In every ship there must be a seeing pilot, not a mere hearing one. [ Carlyle ]

If you sit down a mere philosopher, you will rise almost an atheist. [ Proverb ]

For variety of mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of something. [ Jean Paul Richter ]

The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want. [ Whately ]

The higher the wisdom, the closer its neighbourhood and kinship with mere insanity. [ Carlyle ]

Women have always been picturesque protests against the mere existence of common sense. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

The possession of great powers no doubt carries with it a contempt for mere external show. [ James A. Garfield ]

There are faces so fluid with expression that we can hardly find what the mere features are. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

I cannot conceive that mere idlers can have respect enough for themselves to be comfortable. [ Timothy Flint ]

What was once to me mere matter of the fancy now has grown the vast necessity of heart and life. [ Tennyson ]

There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell but the mere pleasure of God. [ Jonathan Edwards ]

Constant and exclusive devotion to mere physical necessities, degrades man to the rank of an animal. [ Lamennais ]

Avoid him who from mere curiosity asks three questions running about a thing that cannot interest him. [ Lavater ]

Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fame. [ Skobeleff ]

Repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins: it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven. [ Lew Wallace ]

It is quite as much of a trade to make a book as to make a clock. It requires more than mere genius to be an author. [ Bruyere ]

Chance is but a mere name, and really nothing in itself; a conception of our minds, and only a compendious way of speaking. [ Bentley ]

Before the immense possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

We learn nothing from mere hearing, and he who does not take an active part in certain subjects knows them but half and superficially. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Mere intelligence without corresponding energy of the will is a polished sword in its scabbard, contemptible, if it is never drawn forth. [ Lindner ]

Our understandings are always liable to error. Nature and certainty is very hard to come at; and infallibility is mere vanity and pretense. [ Marcus Antoninus ]

Such penalties does the mere intention to sin suffer; for he who meditates any secret wickedness within himself incurs the guilt of the deed. [ Juv ]

Enthusiasm is grave, inward, self-controlled; mere excitement, outward, fantastical, hysterical, and passing in a moment from tears to laughter. [ John Sterling ]

I make little account of genealogical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fate. [ General Skobeleff ]

Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress? [ Dr. Johnson ]

Loveliness does more than destroy ugliness; it destroys matter. A mere touch of it in a room, in a street, even on a door-knocker, is a spiritual force. [ Prof. Drummond ]

Last scene of all, that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness, and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. [ William Shakespeare ]

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself. [ Mrs. Jameson ]

He used words as mere steppingstones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and recrosses the bright and rushing stream of thought. [ Longfellow ]

Grace pays its respects to true intrinsic worth, not to the mere signs and trappings of it, which often only show where it ought to be, not where it really is. [ Thomas à Kempis ]

There is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us. [ Brydges ]

Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity. [ Shenstone ]

Had religion been a mere chimaera, it would long ago have been extinct; were it susceptible of a definite formula, that formula would long ago have been discovered. [ Renan ]

Wanting to have a friend is altogether different from wanting to be a friend. The former is a mere natural human craving, the latter is the life of Christ in the soul. [ J. R. Miller ]

The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character. [ Shenstone ]

Literature is a mere step to knowledge; and the error often lies in our identifying one with the other. Literature may, perhaps, make us vain; true knowledge must make us humble. [ Mrs. John Sanford ]

It is good sense applied with diligence to what was at first a mere accident, and which by great application grew to be called, by the generality of mankind, a particular genius. [ Johnson ]

Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film. [ Carlyle ]

Sculpture is not the mere cutting of the form of anything in stone; it is the cutting of the effect of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would not be in the least like itself. [ John Ruskin ]

Life may as properly be called an art as any other, and the great incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the severest members of a fine statue or a noble poem. [ Fielding ]

Was genius ever ungrateful? Mere talents are dry leaves, tossed up and down by gusts of passion, and scattered and swept away; but Genius lies on the bosom of Memory, and Gratitude at her feet. [ Landor ]

Good-nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it, and certainly to everybody who dwells with them, in so far as mere happiness is concerned. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

The great moments of life are but moments like others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips, though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

The great moments of life are but moments like the others. Your doom is spoken in a word or two. A single look from the eyes, a mere pressure of the hand, may decide it; or of the lips though they cannot speak. [ Thackeray ]

Fiction is no longer a mere amusement; but transcendent genius, accommodating itself to the character of the age, has seized upon this province of literature, and turned fiction from a toy into a mighty engine. [ Channing ]

That mere will and industry can enable any man to accomplish anything is a belief common enough amongst imperfectly educated man. But no one of really cultivated intellect denies the variety of natural endowments. [ Hamerton ]

The wisest of us must, for by far the most part, judge like the simplest; estimate importance by mere magnitude, and expect that which strongly affects our own generation, will strongly affect those that are to follow. [ Carlyle ]

All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little; something which they value far more than for its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life. [ Theodore Parker ]

What is difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere stimulus to men. [ Samuel Warren ]

What is commonly called friendship is no more than a partnership, a reciprocal regard for one another's interests, and an exchange of good offices; in a word, mere traffic, wherein self-love always proposes to be a gainer. [ Rochefoucauld ]

I have no wife or children, good or bad, to provide for; a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which, methinks, are diversely presetted unto me, as from a common theatre or scene. [ Burton ]

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other, and a flower again dwindles down to a mere weed by the same change. [ O. W. Holmes ]

Let him speak of his own deeds, and not of those of his forefathers. High birth is mere accident, and not a virtue; for if reason had controlled birth, and given empire only to the worthy, perhaps Arbaces would have been Xerxes, and Xerxes Arbaces. [ Metastasio ]

Boasting and bravado may exist in the breast even of the coward, if he is successful through a mere lucky hit: but a just contempt of an enemy can alone arise in those who feel that they are superior to their opponent by the prudence of their measures. [ Thucydides ]

The one thing that marks the true artist is a clear perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone. [ O. W. Holmes ]

Nothing is more silly than the pleasure some people take in speaking their minds. A man of this make will say a rude thing for the mere pleasure of saying it, when an opposite behavior, full as innocent, might have preserved his friend, or made his fortune. [ Steele ]

Genius has privileges of its own; it selects an orbit for itself; and be this never so eccentric, if it is indeed a celestial orbit, we mere star-gazers must at last compose ourselves, must cease to cavil at it, and begin to observe it and calculate its laws. [ Carlyle ]

What a chimera is man! What a confused chaos! What a subject of contradictions! A professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depositary and guardian of truth, and yet a mere bundle of uncertainties! the glory and the shame of the universe! [ Pascal ]

Every man must think in his own way; for on his own pathway he always finds a truth, or a measure of truth, which is helpful to him in his life; only he must not follow his own bent without restraint; he must control himself; to follow mere naked instinct does not beseem a man. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

I am of opinion that there is nothing so beautiful but that there is something still more beautiful, of which this is the mere image and expression, - a something which can neither be perceived by the eyes, the ears, nor any of the senses; we comprehend it merely in the imagination. [ Cicero ]

Many men are mere warehouses full of merchandise - the head, the heart, are stuffed with goods. There are apartments in their souls which were once tenanted by taste, and love, and joy, and worship, but they are all deserted now, and the rooms are filled with earthy and material things. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

Love to make others happy; yes, surely at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of any life. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen creatures to wipe and set up.... In our life there is no meaning at all except the work we have done. [ Carlyle ]

It takes twenty years to bring man from the state of embryo, and from that of a mere animal, as he is in his first infancy, to the point when his reason begins to dawn. It has taken thirty centuries to know his structure; it would take eternity to know something of his soul; it takes but an instant to kill him. [ Voltaire ]

Equality is deemed by many a mere speculative chimera, which can never be reduced to practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we ought not to try at least to mitigate it? It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of the legislature must always tend to maintain it. [ Rousseau ]

Beauty of form affects the mind, but then it must be understood that it is not the mere shell that we admire; we are attracted by the idea that this shell is only a beautiful case adjusted to the shape and value of a still more beautiful pearl within. The perfection of outward loveliness is the soul shining through its crystalline covering. [ Jane Porter ]

Surely you will not calculate any essential difference from mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over brackish depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace. You know that the bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and how many blithe hearts dance under coarse wool! [ Chapin ]

Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world. Examine yourself, why you like such and such people and dislike such and such others; and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes. [ Chesterfield ]

The habit of exaggeration in language should be guarded against; it misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive; it imposes on us the society of a balloon, when a moderately-sized skull would fill the place much better; it begets much evil in promising what it cannot perform, and we have often found the most glowing declarations of intended good services end in mere Irish vows. [ Eliza Cook ]

In eloquence, the great triumphs of the art are when the orator is lifted above himself; when consciously he makes himself the mere tongue of the occasion and the hour, and says what cannot but be said. Hence the term abandonment, to describe the self-surrender of the orator. Not his will, but the principle on which he is horsed, the great connection and crisis of events, thunder in the ear of the crowd. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject. [ Blakey ]

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]

The drama is not a mere copy of nature, not a facsimile. It is the free running hand of genius, under the impression of its liveliest wit or most passionate impulses, a thousand times adorning or feeling all as it goes; and you must read it, as the healthy instinct of audiences almost always does, if the critics will let them alone, with a grain of allowance, and a tendency to go away with as much of it for use as is necessary, and the rest for the luxury of laughter, pity, or poetical admiration. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Over Under. These words have various meanings besides the designation of mere locality, and are often misapplied. The terms under oath, under hand and seal, under arms, under his own signature, etc., are fully established and authorized forms of expression, which do not concern the relative positions of the persons and things indicated, but are idiomatic. Hence, over his own signature, is an unjustifiable phrase, despite the fact that the signature is really at the bottom of the instrument signed. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. [ Hazlitt ]

The province of music is rather to express the passions and feelings of the human heart than the actions of men, or the operations of nature. When employed in the former capacity, it becomes an eloquent language; when in the latter, a mere mimic - an imitator, and a very miserable one - or rather a buffoon, caricaturing what it cannot imitate; the idea of the different stages of a battle, or the progress of a tempest being represented to the eye or the ear, or even the imagination, by the quavering of a fiddler's elbow, or the squeaking of catgut, is preposterous. [ G. P. Morris ]

The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, - not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives, - of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive. [ Joseph Anderson ]

mere in Scrabble®

The word mere is playable in Scrabble®, no blanks required.

Scrabble® Letter Score: 6

Highest Scoring Scrabble® Play In The Letters mere:

MERE
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All Scrabble® Plays For The Word mere

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The 50 Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays For Words Using The Letters In mere

MERE
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mere in Words With Friends™

The word mere is playable in Words With Friends™, no blanks required.

Words With Friends™ Letter Score: 7

Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Play In The Letters mere:

MERE
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All Words With Friends™ Plays For The Word mere

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The 53 Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays Using The Letters In mere

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Word Growth involving mere

Shorter words in mere

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re

Longer words containing mere

actinomere actinomeres

antimere antimeres

arthromere arthromeres

blastomere blastomeres

branchiomere branchiomeres

capsomere capsomeres

cashmere cashmeres

ceftamere

centromere centromeres

cephalomere cephalomeres encephalomeres

cephalomere encephalomere encephalomeres

chimere chimeres

chromomere chromomeres

cytomere cytomeres

dermatomere dermatomeres

dormered

ectomere ectomeres

elastomere elastomeres

enteromere enteromeres

entomere entomeres mesentomeres

entomere mesentomere mesentomeres

glimmered

gonomere gonomeres

hammered axehammered

hammered axhammered

hammered jackhammered

hammered rehammered

hammerer hammerers

homered outhomered

hyalomere hyalomeres

hypomere hypomeres

isomere isomeres

karyomere karyomeres

macromere macromeres

merely

merengue

mereonomic

merest

meretricious

mesomere mesomeres

metamere metameres

micromere micromeres

misnomered

myelomere myelomeres

myomere myomeres

nephromere nephromeres

osteomere

phaneromere phaneromeres

plastomere plastomeres

podomere podomeres

rhabdomere rhabdomeres

rhombomere rhombomeres

sarcomere sarcomeres

scleromere scleromeres

shimmered

simmered

somatomere somatomeres

somitomere somitomeres

spheromere spheromeres

stammered

stammerer stammerers

steamered

summered

telomere telomeres

timeresolved

uromere neuromere neuromeres

uromere uromeres neuromeres

yammered

yammerer yammerers

zygotomere zygotomeres