Learn English – A word meaning “To bring out of retirement” / “To bring back into use”

In the sense ‘administer (punishment)’, I am quite certain that I have never used or even seen ‘mete’ on its own without ‘out’. It is to me an unbreakuppable (unupbreakable? Erm … inseparable!) phrasal verb construction, and leaving out the phrasal adverb is quite simply not possible in my idiolect.

As a copy editor and proofreader, if I had come across a sentence like your example from 2008, I would simply have assumed it was an error and added the ‘out’ back in—or possibly, if the context did not make the phrase clearer than it is in your quote here, I would have added a big, fat question mark, asking the author whether it is supposed to mean that the queen would measure the punishment (in whatever way that might make sense) and suggest that he recast the sentence entirely to avoid this ambiguity and jarring unidiomaticness.

However, this is all just my own, personal experience and gut feeling speaking.

Googling “mete punishment” in quotes does yield nearly 4,500 hits, of which at least some on the very first page appear to be (presumably) native speakers using the phrase without the adverb in this sense, in places where literacy and style would be expected (presumably):

The following sentence is from a December 1893 edition of Race and Place Newspapers (Richmond, VA):

Rape should be punished with death. The law decrees it, and we so agree. We insist that the law be left free to mete punishment and that the necessary safeguards be thrown around the accused to the end that the execution of an innocent man and the escape of the guilty brute may not be within the realms of a reasonable possibility.

Then there is this open letter from the Memphis, TN, Commercial Appeal, entitled Mete punishment where it belongs.

There are also some articles from the Huffington Post, etc.

So clearly, the adverb is not necessary to all native speakers. I do not know whether it is a coincidence that both the examples mentioned above are from the eastern/southeastern part of the US, or if there is indeed a dialectal difference here, with the phrasal verb being more loosely attached to the verb in that general area.

Googling “mete out punishment” in quotes yields over 700,000 results, which shows (even discounting incidental and disqualifiable hits) that the version with the adverb is far more common than without it, by a ratio of about 150:1 on the Internet as a whole. Presumably, this discrepancy is even greater in formal writing.

So I would strongly advise any writer to err on the side of convention here and always include the adverb. At least that (as far as I know) is not unidiomatic or ungrammatical to anyone.

You can understand "back" as a verb "back up" and add into: Back up into

You might think that sounds strange, but that is correct to understanding it.

First, you might want to find definitions of back, verb. If that doesn't help, you can search for back into. The advantage of the Internet is that you can put quotation marks around just about anything, then search:

define verb "back into"

Here, I saw back into in bold, so, under back, verb, I saw: — back into: to get into inadvertently (well, that's one definition, and comparing it to your title, it seems to work.)

But here it was perfect: to move backwards, or make someone or something move backwards; back into/out of/away from etc. She backed into a doorway to let the crowds pass by.

In addition, it gave me a few more phrasals using back. :)

By the way, that book looks really interesting, and I like National Book Award winners, so you have helped me, too.