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Allin

merely

adverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmɪəli//
  • Canada//ˈmɪɹli//
  • Australia//ˈmɪəli//
  • New Zealand//ˈmiəli//

Without any other reason etc.; only, just, and nothing more.

adverb

  1. 1

    Without any other reason etc.; only, just, and nothing more.

    But let us not be unfair to the kibitzers. Not all players hate 'em. Some merely dislike 'em.

    All these people, who have tried to set you against me out of envy and love of slander – and some too merely passing on what they have been told by others – all these are very difficult to deal with.

  2. 2

    obsoleteWholly, entirely.

    It is not forgot, since the acute and distinct Arminius was perverted meerly by the perusing of a namelesse discourse writt'n at Delf, which at first he took in hand to confute.

    I am sorry to say, that I doubt if there is a judge in Massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence under a law which is merely contrary to the law of God.

Etymology

From Middle English mereli, equivalent to mere + -ly.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).