Mere vs Purely - What's the difference?
mere | purely |
(obsolete) the sea
(dialectal, or, literary) a pool; a small lake or pond; marsh
* 1955 , William Golding, The Inheritors , Faber & Faber 2005, p. 194:
boundary, limit; a boundary-marker; boundary-line
* 1590 , Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , III.ix:
(obsolete) To limit; bound; divide or cause division in.
(obsolete) To set divisions and bounds.
(label) Pure, unalloyed .
* 1590 , (Edmund Spenser), The Faerie Queene , III.8:
* , I.56:
(label) Nothing less than; complete, downright .
* , II.3.7:
Just, only; no more than , pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected.
*
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* 1962 , , Flush Times :
Solely; exclusively; merely, simply.
* 2005 , Owen Bowcott, The Guardian , 8 Apr 2005:
* 2007 , ‘(Helen Brooks)’, His Christmas Bride :
*:"But this meal tonight is not a date, not in the traditional sense. It's purely platonic, I assure you."
Chastely, innocently; in a sinless manner, without fault.
* 1623 , (William Shakespeare), Troilus and Cressida , First Folio, IV.7:
* 1823 , (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Table Talk :
As a noun mere
is the sea.As a verb mere
is to limit; bound; divide or cause division in.As an adjective mere
is famous.As an adverb purely is
wholly; really, completely.mere
English
(wikipedia mere)Etymology 1
From (etyl) mere, from (etyl) .Alternative forms
* (l), (l), (l)Noun
(en noun)- (Drayton)
- (Tennyson)
- Lok got to his feet and wandered along by the marshes towards the mere where Fa had disappeared.
Derived terms
* mereswine * mermaid * merman * merfolkEtymology 2
From (etyl), from (etyl) .Alternative forms
* (l), (l), (l), (l)Noun
(en noun)- 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.
Verb
(mer)Etymology 3
From (etyl), from (etyl) .Alternative forms
* (l), (l)Etymology 4
From (etyl) meer, from (etyl) mier, from (etyl) merus. Perhaps influenced by (etyl) , or conflated with Etymology 3.Adjective
(er)- So oft as I this history record, / My heart doth melt with meere compassion.
- Meere .
- If every man might have what he wouldwe should have another chaos in an instant, a meer confusion.
- 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;.
Internal Combustion, passage=More than a mere source of Promethean sustenance to thwart the cold and cook one's meat, wood was quite simply mankind's first industrial and manufacturing fuel.}}
Pixels or Perish, passage=Drawings and pictures are more than mere ornaments in scientific discourse. Blackboard sketches, geological maps, diagrams of molecular structure, astronomical photographs, MRI images, the many varieties of statistical charts and graphs: These pictorial devices are indispensable tools for presenting evidence, for explaining a theory, for telling a story.}}
Derived terms
* merelyEtymology 5
From (etyl) .Statistics
*Anagrams
* ----purely
English
Adverb
(en adverb)- I am fascinated by the entire scene, I purely am.
- The IRA should "lead by example" and "unilaterally" abandon paramilitary violence and adopt a purely political strategy, a leading Sinn Féin MP urged yesterday.
- faith and troth, / Strain'd purely from all hollow bias drawing: / Bids thee with most diuine integritie, / From heart of very heart, great Hector welcome.
- By some means or other the water flows purely , and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current [...].