Melding

[meld] /mɛld/ Cards.

verb (used with or without object)
1.
to announce and display (a counting combination of cards in the hand) for a score.
noun
2.
the act of melding.
3.
any combination of cards to be melded.
[meld] /mɛld/
verb (used with or without object)
1.
to merge; blend.
noun
2.
a blend.
/mɛld/
verb
1.
(in some card games) to declare or lay down (cards), which then score points
noun
2.
the act of melding
3.
a set of cards for melding
/mɛld/
verb
1.
to blend or become blended; combine
v.

“to blend together, merge, unite” (intransitive), by 1910, of uncertain origin. OED suggests “perh. a blend of MELT v.1 and WELD v.” Said elsewhere to be a verb use of melled “mingled, blended,” past participle of dialectal mell “to mingle, mix, combine, blend.”

[T]he biplane grew smaller and smaller, the stacatto clatter of the motor became once more a drone which imperceptibly became melded with the waning murmur of country sounds …. [“Aircraft” magazine, October 1910]

But it is perhaps an image from card-playing, where the verb meld is attested by 1907 in a sense of “combine two cards for a score:”

Upon winning a trick, and before drawing from the stock, the player can “meld” certain combinations of cards. [rules for two-hand pinochle in “Hoyle’s Games,” 1907]

The rise of the general sense of the word in English coincides with the craze for canasta, in which melding figures. The card-playing sense is said to be “apparently” from German melden “make known, announce,” from Old High German meldon, from Proto-Germanic *meldojan (cf. Old English meldian “to declare, tell, display, proclaim”), and the notion is of “declaring” the combination of cards. Related: Melded; melding.