mettle
Other forms: mettles
Mettle is the courage to carry on. If someone wants to "test your mettle," they want to see if you have the heart to follow through when the going gets tough.
Having the mettle to do something means you have guts. In short, you're a pretty impressive person. If you have the intellectual mettle to enter a political debate, not only do you know a lot about politics, but you have the spunk to show it off. Metal and mettle were once used interchangeably meaning a solid material like gold and the "stuff a person is made of" — until everyone got confused and the words went their separate ways.
-
the courage to carry on
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
medal / meddle / mettle
Vocabulary lists containing mettle
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
In this tragedy, Macbeth's belief in a prophecy and his ambition to become king lead to murder and madness. Read the full text of the play here.
