This article presents an explicit method that can be reliably employed to identify metaphorically used words in discourse. Our aim is to provide metaphor scholars with a tool that may be flexibly applied to many research contexts. We present the "metaphor identification procedure" (MIP), followed by an example of how the procedure can be applied to identifying metaphorically used words in 1 text. We then suggest a format for reporting the results of MIP, and present the data from our case study describing the empirical reliability of the procedure, discuss several complications associated with using the procedure in practice, and then briefly compare MIP to other proposals on metaphor identification. The final section of the paper suggests ways that MIP may be employed in disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of metaphor. One of the major developments in metaphor research in the last several years has been the focus on identifying and explicating metaphoric language in real discourse. Isolated constructed examples, often seen in linguistic research, or stimuli created by psychologists for experimental purposes, provide important materials for studying the structure and functions of metaphor. Yet making claims about the ubiquity and realistic understanding of metaphoric language demands that metaphor scholars explore "metaphor in the wild" as speakers and writers produce it in varying contexts. The primary difficulty with this line of work, however, is that researchers often differ in their intuitions about what constitutes a metaphoric word or phrase. Metaphor scholars often do not provide criteria in their empirical investigations (Pragglejaz Group)