Picture a ladder standing in the middle of a room, with no rope tied to it and no name on any rung. Whoever can climb it goes up; the family you come from, the money in your pocket and the people you know are all left at the bottom. That is the arrangement the word names. Everything else the word does grows out of that one picture — including the sharp question that follows it around: the ladder may be open, but people arrive at it carrying very different loads.
From the word’s history
The packet traces the word to merit + -o- + -cracy, the -cracy ending that also sits in democracy and aristocracy and that names who rules. It records the coinage: Alan Fox, a British sociologist, in Socialist Commentary in 1956, used as a derisive term. So the mocking edge many writers still give the word is not something modern critics added; it was there in the first use.
證據顯示這個字是 merit 加 -o- 再加 -cracy 組成的，-cracy 就是 democracy、aristocracy 裡那個表示「由誰統治」的字尾。證據也記下它的來歷：英國社會學家 Alan Fox 一九五六年在 Socialist Commentary 上造出來，而且是當成嘲諷的說法在用。所以今天很多文章用它時帶著的那點刺，並不是後人加上去的，第一次出現時就在了。
Wiktionary, "meritocracy"
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