merry.
Jolly and full of high spirits; happy.
Meaning & usage
Jolly and full of high spirits; happy.
We had a very merry Christmas.
Festive and full of fun and laughter.
Everyone was merry at the party.
Brisk.
The play moved along at a merry pace.
The car moved at a merry clip.
Causing laughter, mirth, gladness, or delight.
a merry jest
Drunk; tipsy.
Some of us got a little merry at the office Christmas party.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English myrie, merie, mery, from Old English myrġe, myriġe (“pleasing, agreeable; pleasant, sweet, delightful; melodious”), from Proto-West Germanic *murgī (“short, slow, leisurely”), from Proto-Germanic *murguz (“short, slow”), from Proto-Indo-European *mréǵʰus (“short”). Cognate with Scots mery, mirry (“merry”), Middle Dutch mergelijc (“pleasant, agreeable, joyful”), Norwegian dialectal myrjel (“small object, figurine”), Latin brevis (“short, small, narrow, shallow”), Ancient Greek βραχύς (brakhús, “short”). Doublet of brief.
An English wild cherry.
Where this word comes from
From French merise.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.