Merging - Definition and Overview

Merge, merging, or merger can have several different meanings:

• In business and economics, a merger is the combination of two companies into one larger company
• In computer science, either:
  • the merge algorithm which combines two or more sorted lists into a single sorted one
  • the merge sort, a sort algorithm that sorts a list by relying on the merge algorithm
  • Merge is a computer package, a cut-down 'Virtual Machine', for running Windows 9x on x86 processors under UNIX (see Win4Lin)
• In criminal law, merger characterises situations where one crime subsumes another
• In linguistics, especially historical linguistics and dialectology, a merger is a sound change whereby two sounds that were originally separate phonemes come to be pronounced exactly the same. The so-called cot-caught merger in modern American English is an example.
• In music,
  • Merge (album) by Canadian musician Randy Bachman
• In transportation,
  • merging is when a vehicle signals a lane change and then switches lanes, either because one lane is ending, to reach the correct lane to exit, or to reach a less congested lane in which one can go faster; merging is among the times when car accidents are more likely

For information about how to merge duplicate articles in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Duplicate articles