mettle - a person's ability to cope well with difficulties; spirit and resilience.

Yes!!!!!! ^^^^^^^ I thought I was going crazy when someone asked me to prove my sentence!!

I use the following joke to help remember that tricky word: "A knight in shining armor has never had his mettle tested"

@FumbleFingers didn't see that comment! I didn't copy, honest :)

@marcellothearcane: NP. I must admit that back when I was still chasing rep here on ELU I'd probably have posted an actual answer myself. But older (and imho wiser! :) now I just threw it in as a comment while closevoting. It'll be interesting to see whether four others (or a mod) also closevote, but I'm guessing this might be an area where opinions differ, so whichever way it goes maybe it ought to be kicked around in meta.

@FumbleFingers I didn't include a list of all the synonym research I did b/c I thought it would be obnoxious or distracting. Will reconsider next time

@FumbleFingers I'll mature somewhen (I hope!) not really after rep, just privileges (which amounts to the same thing, unfortunately)

@LamonteCristo: The text of the preset closevote reason I chose suggests "lack of research", but I fully appreciate that this kind of "homophone lookup" isn't necessarily easy. Interestingly though, I just said define metal to my smartphone, which it interpreted as define mettle straight off by default. I only got my first smartphone a few months ago, and I'm still fascinated by how if I start off by saying what wood it initially transcribes that as what would. Then if the next word is is, it goes back and rewrites my evolving query as what wood is... (Love it! :)

Cannot fathom why this has close votes... this is a great question. For future questions like this, you might find this link handy: rhymezone.com/r/…

@Dancrumb: My thinking was This is the kind of thing competent native speakers just know. Effectively, my closevote would have been for "General Knowledge" back when that was one of the preset reasons here. But I don't feel that strongly about it, as implied by earlier comment. If the majority think we should keep questions like this open, I wouldn't want to make a big issue of it.

Thanks @FumbleFingers; I definitely wouldn't make an issue of it. I don't recall the "General Knowledge" option, but I've experience something similar in Stack Exchange, when they used to have a "Too narrow" reason for closevoting that no longer exists... its absence still trips me up :)

@marcellothearcane: I'm sure it'd be a net benefit to the site if you had more privileges, so I'm more than happy to see you pick up plenty of rep from your "fish in a barrel" answer, regardless of whatever I might think about the suitability of the question in the first place. And as Dr. John constantly reminds us: If I don't do it somebody else will.

@Dancrumb: There are 3 closevotes now. If it gets 2 more and even one person votes to reopen, I'd like to see the arguments kicked around on meta.

@LamonteCristo: I've already pointed out at least twice that if we're to debate the arguments for/against my closevote, that should probably be tackled in a dedicated meta question, rather that extended comments here (which I imagine the mods will delete, sooner or later).

Also, not all smartphones and technology has the same auto prediction. I work in AI learning, and I'm sure my Google AI, Siri on Apple, and autocorrect is heavily biased to my use cases.

Yes, this will likely be moved to chat, and archived, but the reference will still exist, and can be linked to in Meta. I will get back to writing .. and let the champions of English.SE debate that. I'll rest my discussion.

The title makes this a great question. IDC what filler is after that.

@LamonteCristo most auto correct 'learns' your usage - there's plenty of 'auto correct fails' where unexpectedly (nsfw) words replace things in texts

@LamonteCristo we'll have to see if 4 other people (or a mod) agrees with FF... quite a few questions have close votes, but don't come to anything.

I'm curious to know why if you knew the word sounded like "metal", you didn't Google homophones for "metal"?