A merger is the joining of two or more companies or organizations into one larger entity. It can also describe the blending of separate things into a single whole.
From the verb “merge” plus the noun-forming suffix “-er”. “Merge” comes from Latin “mergere” meaning 'to dip, plunge, immerse', which later took on the sense of things sinking into and becoming one with something else. The business sense grew in the 19th and 20th centuries with corporate law.
A 'merger' is literally a corporate 'sinking together'—two firms disappearing into a new single identity. In phonetics, 'merger' describes sounds that used to be different but collapsed into one, like how 'cot' and 'caught' sound the same for many English speakers.
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