Melee

A melee (/ˈmeɪleɪ/ or /ˈmɛleɪ/, French: mêlée, (French: [mɛle])) or pell-mell is disorganized hand-to-hand combat in battles fought at abnormally close range with little central control once it starts.^[1] In military aviation, a mêlée has been defined as "an air battle in which several aircraft, both friend and foe, are confusingly intermingled".^[2]

The term melee originates in the 1640s from the French word mêlée, which refers to disorganized hand-to-hand combat, a close-quarters battle, a brawl, or a confused fight; especially involving many combatants.^[3][4][5]

In the 1579 translation of Plutarch's Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes, Sir Thomas North uses the term 'pelmel' to refer to a disorganized retreat.^[6] The phrase was later used in its current spelling in Shakespeare's Richard III, 1594:

"March on, ioine brauelie, let vs to it pell mell, / If not to heauen then hand in hand to hell."

The phrase comes from the French expression pêle-mêle, a rhyme based on the old French mesler, meaning to mix or mingle.^[6][7]

The French term melee was first used in English in c. 1640 (also derived from the old French mesler,^[8] but the Old French stem survives in medley and meddle).^[1]

Lord Nelson described his tactics for the Battle of Trafalgar as inducing a "pell mell battle" focused on engagements between individual ships where the superior morale and skill of the Royal Navy would prevail.^[9]

The 1812 tabletop war game Kriegsspiel referred to the hand-combat stage of the game as a melee.^[10] Later war games would follow this pattern.^[11][12][13] From there, gamers would eventually begin to call the weapons used in that stage melee weapons.^[14][15]

H.G. Wells' 1913 Little Wars was the first to specifically outline a "melee" rule in his eponymous war game.^[16] Many later wargames (and video games) can trace their origins to the rulesets first laid out in Little Wars.^[17][18]

In 1968, Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren adopted and modified the rules for Siege of Bodenburg, a medieval war game, and expanded on rules for one-on-one melee combat and specific melee weapon rules.^[19][20] This modified ruleset was published as Chainmail and included a fantasy supplement which would later be known as Dungeons & Dragons. The popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, which featured a "melee phase" to represent the fighting of characters outside of bows and magic, would help spread the use of "melee" as a phrase for other table-top and video games regarding any form of combat involving close proximity to and direct physical contact with an opponent, whether unarmed, using weapons or, occasionally, through other methods besides typical strikes and grappling, such as certain status effects that require physical contact to implement.

Look up melee or mêlée in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Close-quarters combat
• Hand-to-hand combat
• Melee (gaming)

• Fremont-Barnes, Gregory (2005), Trafalgar 1805: Nelson's Crowning Victory, Osprey Publishing, p. 38 38, ISBN 978-1-84176-892-2
• Kumar, Bharat; DeRemer, Dale; Marshall, Douglas (2004), An Illustrated Dictionary of Aviation, McGraw Hill Professional, p. 462, ISBN 978-0-07-178260-9
• "mêlée n.", Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.), Oxford University Press, March 2015

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