MEANING
1. The worth or good qualities of something that make it deserving of praise or consideration.
2. Deserve or be important enough to receive a particular kind of attention or treatment.
Use it for
evaluating an argument on its own qualities; comparing a proposal’s advantages and limitations; separating substantive worth from the speaker’s reputationEvaluates a position’s qualities and separately states that an issue deserves attention or treatment. Academic functions: Analysis / Interpretation, Argumentation.
Words that belong together
- intellectual merit
- the merits of a proposal
- on its own merits
On the page
The committee evaluates the proposal on its merits rather than the applicant’s institutional prestige.
The critic acknowledges the interpretation’s merits while questioning its account of chronology.
The unexpected result merits further investigation even though it does not overturn the theory.
The discrepancy is small, but it merits discussion because the conclusion depends on that comparison.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- merit
- Past tense
- merited
- Past participle
- merited
- Present participle
- meriting
Usage notes
Noun, countable or uncountable: merit; merits. Transitive verb: merit attention. Third-person merits; past and past participle merited; present participle meriting. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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