Multicolumn cells in org-mode tables

Question

Is it possible to merge two or more cells in an org-mode table like when using \multicolumn{}{}{} or \multirow{}{}{} in LaTeX?

Something like this does not work:

|------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------|
|            |             Singular            | Plural      |
|            +-----------+----------+----------+-------------|
|            | Masculine | Neuter   | Feminine | All genders |
|------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------|
| Nominative | *der*     | *das*    | *die*    | *die*       |
| Accusative | *den*     | *das*    | *die*    | *die*       |
| Dative     | *dem*     | *dem*    | *der*    | *denen*     |
| Genetive   | *dessen*  | *dessen* | *deren*  | *deren*     |
|------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------|

Is there a way to construct such a table in org-mode?

Answer 1

As @wvxvw points out, you can use table.el by Takaaki Ota. There is some built-in support for this in org-mode (see manual). Your example can be easily translated to table.el syntax by replacing some | with +:

+------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------+
|            |             Singular            | Plural      |
|            +-----------+----------+----------+-------------+
|            | Masculine | Neuter   | Feminine | All genders |
+------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------+
| Nominative | *der*     | *das*    | *die*    | *die*       |
| Accusative | *den*     | *das*    | *die*    | *die*       |
| Dative     | *dem*     | *dem*    | *der*    | *denen*     |
| Genitive   | *dessen*  | *dessen* | *deren*  | *deren*     |
+------------+-----------+----------+----------+-------------+

The table can be edited using C-c ' and it exports fine with the HTML and LaTeX backends, except that org-mode syntax (such as using asterisks for bold) inside the cells is not recognised. Here is an example of rendered LaTeX export: