polyphase merge sort

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polyphase merge sort A method of merging in which the keys are kept on more than one backing store or file. Items are merged from the source files onto another file. Whenever one of the source files is exhausted, it immediately becomes the destination of the merge operations from the nonexhausted and previous-destination files. When there is only one file left the process stops. The repeated merging is referred to as polyphase merging.