Whether they are collecting data from spoken or written sources, learners or teachers, English corpora or academic essays, or talk about disease and illness, applied linguists are confronted with the pervasive use of metaphor. Metaphor, as a mode of talk and thought, is a way of making meaning that is particularly linked to the sociocultural context. What counts as a metaphor? How can we operationalize, analyze, and categorize it? What research methodology is best suited for the study of metaphor? Cameron and Low's timely collection of papers is a first attempt to put metaphor research on the map of applied linguistics.