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say it: MER-uht
merit is a noun and verb meaning "any admirable quality or attribute". It carries 3 recorded senses.
the quality of being deserving (e.g., deserving assistance)
“there were many children whose deservingness he recognized and rewarded”
be worthy or deserving
“You deserve a promotion after all the hard work you have done”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for merit come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.