(n.) Substance or quality of temperament; spirit, esp. as regards honor, courage, fortitude, ardor, etc.; disposition; -- usually in a good sense.
Example Sentences:
(1) Analysts and industry watchers say it is too soon to judge the mettle of Lewis and new finance director Alan Stewart, whose tenure can still be measured in weeks.
(2) His son has yet to prove his mettle on the political stage.
(3) It’s in these barren parts that the Edwards air force base is located, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier for the first time, and where the test pilots celebrated in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff proved their mettle before going on to become America’s first astronauts.
(4) First of all it puts the prime minister on their mettle.
(5) Our job is to co-ordinate the response, to see that this plays through, at least in the first phase, sweetly.” Nonetheless it is a mighty test for little Malta, which now has to prove its mettle as a European force to be reckoned with, fighting for the interests of the EU above those of the UK.
(6) Arsenal's defeat at Stoke and Manchester City's engagement in the Capital One Cup final meant victory would propel them into second place, a challenge to which teams of less mettle would not have risen.
(7) She is the founder and chief executive of Spark+Mettle , a charity that aims to help people flourish.
(8) Whether we have had the mettle to stay the course in delivering effective government for our country at a time of crisis.
(9) One of those funded is Discoverables Ltd, a company limited by shares set up by youth charity Spark+Mettle.
(10) He was a leader writer and then senior editor on the Times for the best part of a decade and showed his intellectual mettle as a member of Radio 4's Moral Maze panel.
(11) Visitors can rent a canoe from Thorncrest Outfitters in Tobermory, test their mettle by boulder-climbing in more remote spots, or scramble through caves along the lakeshores.
(12) The former World Bank economist is widely seen as a loyal timeserver, whose priority has been to maintain the Congress grip on power until Rahul Gandhi , a former management consultant still widely seen as yet to prove his political mettle, was ready to take what some see as his birthright.
(13) Michael Aston says: "Gotta feeling Ravens will win handily, not convinced San Fran have the mettle for this type of game against a vicious, tireless D and Flaco has been stellar lately.
(14) We do need to invest – in transport, in communications, in skills and, in fact, in our public services – because unless we have an educated and trained workforce, unless we have healthy workers, we are not going to be able to tackle that pretty grim picture on productivity, which caps our aspiration and caps our living standards.” Having worked closely with Vince Cable, the Lib Dem business secretary who lost his seat in May, and with new Tory ministers keen to show their cost-cutting mettle, she is concerned about whether Javid will put as much emphasis on industrial strategy.
(15) Insurgents have take advantage of Kabul's distracted state, launching some of the large offensives around the country to test the mettle of the fledgling security force.
(16) Such conservatives wanted Boehner to show more mettle in standing up to President Obama, particularly over their desire to see the women’s health organisation Planned Parenthood , which provides abortions, stripped of federal funding – an issue that brought the possibility of a shutdown to the fore.
(17) "Let us bring about a radical turn in the building of an economic giant with the same spirit and mettle as were displayed in conquering space."
(18) The 43-year-old, who entered parliament in 2004 when Congress returned to power, has struggled to convince voters and analysts, as well as many within his party, that he has the mettle for the brutal rough and tumble of politics in the world's largest democracy.
(19) You might think that when you train a skilled engineer to clean furniture – on the basis that the reason for his idleness was that he'd got out of the habit of work, that he needed to prove his mettle with whatever menial task you chose for him – there's a moral case to answer here, too.
(20) And so the performance, rehearsed with the professionals and now played with them, proceeds on its mettle – boisterous and ebullient, ending in applause.
Pluck
Definition:
(v. t.) To pull; to draw.
(v. t.) Especially, to pull with sudden force or effort, or to pull off or out from something, with a twitch; to twitch; also, to gather, to pick; as, to pluck feathers from a fowl; to pluck hair or wool from a skin; to pluck grapes.
(v. t.) To strip of, or as of, feathers; as, to pluck a fowl.
(v. t.) To reject at an examination for degrees.
(v. i.) To make a motion of pulling or twitching; -- usually with at; as, to pluck at one's gown.
(n.) The act of plucking, or the state of being plucked, at college. See Pluck, v. t., 4.
(v. t.) The lyrie.
Example Sentences:
(1) So Fifa left that group out and went ahead with the draw – according to legend, plucking names from the Jules Rimet trophy itself – and, after Belgium were chosen but decided not to participate, Wales came out next.
(2) The woman said it took her until the mid-1990s to pluck up the courage to report the abuse to Jersey's children's services department – and that her allegations were not taken seriously enough.
(3) Many of Long’s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation , a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble.
(4) They're partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves.
(5) It described experiments in which skin cells plucked from mice were reprogrammed into what looked for all the world like embryonic stem cells.
(6) She said: "I have asked the migration advisory committee – and I am not going to pluck at figures from thin air – to look at these issues to see if we can get to a point where we can get a better assessment and a better judgment of the true picture, in relation to the costs or otherwise of the decisions that we are taking, because I do not believe that the impact assessment gives a full and true picture at the moment."
(7) Given how empty the sea is, it was a miracle that his distress signal, transmitted to the ever-watchful Falmouth Coastguard, was picked up by a Chinese supertanker whose crew plucked him from the water minutes before his boat sank.
(8) The various components of these muscles are provided with stiff as well as wide aponeuroses and tendons (much stronger than those observed in Columba), indicating forceful opening and closure of the beaks for plucking off the fruit, grasping it hard and manipulating it with the help of the beaks before swallowing.
(9) Usually but this time they're on their feet, plucking like workers in a chicken factory working on a bonus system for number of feathers plucked.
(10) Using the CRD, outer root sheath cells, isolated from plucked human hair follicles and plated on growth-arrested 3T3 feeder layers, were grown on native collagen lattices populated with living human fibroblasts.
(11) After this treatment, we plucked anagen hairs under standardized conditions both from the area treated with C and the contralateral, untreated area.
(12) The present study demonstrates the possibilities of DNA flow cytometry to study the pharmacological effects on cell kinetics of plucked human anagen hairs.
(13) I was much more comfortable with the data in Canada ( where he was governor before being plucked to run Threadneedle Street ), Carney replies .
(14) Dahl’s heroine, Sophie, is a lonely young girl plucked from her bed in an orphanage by the titular behemoth, and carried off to Giant Land, his home, lest she alert the normal world to the presence of giants.
(15) The number of carcasses which were positive after cooling was found to have decreased in poultry-processing plant B compared with the situation after plucking, whereas this number was not affected to any appreciable extent in processing plant A.
(16) Activities in both plucked and unplucked skin were higher in the animals fed diets with higher protein contents.
(17) counsels their mother, whose superb cheeriness and pluck are the things with which we truly built the empire), and seek out new friends and entertainments.
(18) Some boxing experts believe that, starting his career at light-middleweight against Hungary's Attila Molnar , Saunders will eventually emerge as the most successful of the trio Warren has plucked from the British Olympic team.
(19) Such organizations as Project Censored exist to call attention to, for instance, the "Top Censored Stories Corporate Media Won't Dare Touch" – pretty much all of which, of course, have been plucked from the corporate media.
(20) Rearing environment (enriched vs. normal) and method of vibrissae removal (cauterization of follicles vs. plucking) were examined to determine specific factors that m might influence the effect of vibrissae removal.