It's the word of the day for May 3rd.

Today's word is METI, E, spelled M-E-T-I-E-R. M-E-R. M-I-E-R is a noun.

M-T-E-E-S-E-ier sometimes is spelled with an acute accent rising to the right

above the first E. Métier is a formal word that refers to something that a person does

very well. Here's the word used in a sentence from the conversation by Matthew Redmond.

Turning from his father's trade of corset-making, Thomas Payne 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.

Over the centuries, English has borrowed several French words related in some way to work or working,

among them, oeuvre, meaning a substantial body of work of a writer, an artist, or a composer,

and travail, meaning work of a laborious nature, toil.

Metier is another.

It's 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 word mistier, meaning duty craft or profession.

In English, we tend toward a narrower meaning for metier, 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.

With your word of the day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.

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