A melee ( or ) is disorganized hand-to-hand combat in battles fought at close range with little central control once it starts. In military aviation, a mêlée has been defined as "an air battle in which several aircraft, both friend and foe, are confusingly intermingled".

Etymology and meaning of the term

The English term melee originated in the 1640s from the French word mêlée and means a confused struggle or fight among several people, especially in hand-to-hand combat and battles among many combatants. The French term is derived from the Old French mesler, which survives in medley and meddle.

Usage in gaming

The 1812 tabletop war game Kriegsspiel referred to the hand-combat stage of the game as a melee. Later war games would follow this pattern. From there, gamers would eventually begin to call the weapons used in that stage melee weapons. H.G. Wells' 1913 Little Wars was the first to specifically outline a "melee" rule in his eponymous war game. Many later wargames (and video games) can trace their origins to the rulesets first laid out in Little Wars. 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. 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.