Word of the Day:

“Turning from his father’s trade of corset-making, [Thomas] Paine tried his hand at business, met and impressed Benjamin Franklin in London, sailed to America, and there found his true metier as a pamphleteer and radical.” — Matthew Redmond, The Conversation, 9 Oct. 2025

More example sentences

Over the centuries, English has borrowed several French words related in some way to work or working, among them oeuvre (“a substantial body of work of a writer, an artist, or a composer”) and travail (“work of a laborious nature, toil”). Métier (pronounced /MET-yay/) is another. It is sometimes translated from its original French as “job” or “career” but in that language it more accurately refers to the trade or profession in which one works (it traces back to the Old French mistier, meaning “duty, craft, profession”). In English we tend toward a narrower meaning for métier, referring either to a job for which one is perfectly suited or a particular field in which one is extremely skilled. This makes it a synonym of another French borrowing, forte.