If You Meet a Murderer, Will You Mete Out Justice?
Watch these tricky little sound-alikes, because misusing them can really make you look bad.
Both are verbs (well, most commonly used as verbs).
Meet means to come face to face with, to come together with. (Example: We will meet in the conference room.)
Mete means to dispense or hand out. (Example: The food pantry will mete out the donations to those who need assistance.) Mete is often used in the sense of dispensing legal consequences: The judge will mete out justice to the vandals.
At the risk of adding confusion, the Grammar Guru should point out that meet can also be used as an adjective meaning “suitable or appropriate.” For example, a “help-meet” is a helper suitable to another person. Or you might say, “We have been invited to a fancy-dress ball on Saturday, but in light of our father’s death this morning, it’s not meet that we should go.”