toil

1 of 3

noun (1)

1
: long strenuous fatiguing labor
2
archaic
b
: laborious effort
toilful adjective
toilfully adverb

toil

2 of 3

verb

toiled; toiling; toils

intransitive verb

1
: to work hard and long
2
: to proceed with laborious effort : plod

transitive verb

1
archaic : overwork
2
archaic : to get or accomplish with great effort
toiler noun

toil

3 of 3

noun (2)

1
: a net to trap game
2
: something by which one is held fast or inextricably involved : snare, trap
usually used in plural
caught in the toils of the law
Choose the Right Synonym for toil

work, labor, travail, toil, drudgery, grind mean activity involving effort or exertion.

work may imply activity of body, of mind, of a machine, or of a natural force.

too tired to do any work

labor applies to physical or intellectual work involving great and often strenuous exertion.

farmers demanding fair compensation for their labor

travail is bookish for labor involving pain or suffering.

years of travail were lost when the house burned

toil implies prolonged and fatiguing labor.

his lot would be years of back-breaking toil

drudgery suggests dull and irksome labor.

an editorial job with a good deal of drudgery

grind implies labor exhausting to mind or body.

the grind of the assembly line

Examples of toil in a Sentence

Verb workers toiling in the fields They were toiling up a steep hill.
Recent Examples on the Web
Noun
All this toil gave Acocella the ability and license to distill and make big judgments even within the restrictive word count of a review or magazine piece. Charles Arrowsmith, Los Angeles Times, 26 Feb. 2024 If true cohesion, borne of toil and time, is just too hard to pull off in L.A., where the spotlight burns harshly and the king’s reign is finite? Mirjam Swanson, Orange County Register, 4 Jan. 2024 This often uncovers disconnects, unnecessary toil or broken processes that can be corrected or improved through a workaround. Expert Panel®, Forbes, 14 Feb. 2024 But without oral histories being passed down through the generations, the struggles and toils of the Moores’ daily life are easily forgotten. Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 14 Jan. 2024 Rubio knows the toil that spending so long in microgravity can take on human bones, muscle strength, and other parts of the human body that evolved over hundreds of millions of years to live in Earth's gravity. Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2023 This is regrettable, because much of what comes out of the kitchen, in which half a dozen cooks toil, including the owner’s brother Mohammad, deserves more of an audience. Tom Sietsema, Washington Post, 22 Dec. 2023 Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell’s Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage — but not both at once — to customers as gifts. David Streitfeld, New York Times, 4 Nov. 2023 While North Americans and Europeans experiment with a four-day week, many employees in developing countries toil six days — or more. Mary Beth Sheridan, Washington Post, 31 Dec. 2023
Verb
Hundreds of thousands of them now toil in South Korea, typically in small factories, or on remote farms or fishing boats — jobs that locals consider too dirty, dangerous or low-paying. Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2024 Screenwriter John Orloff spent thousands of hours over the course of a decade toiling on the script. Chloe Melas, NBC News, 19 Feb. 2024 Contrary to Maynard Keys’ predictions for 2030, the constant demand for more keeps workers toiling in offices, in factories, in cafes, and all the places that products and ideas are made. Melissa A. Wheeler, Forbes, 15 Feb. 2024 Over the last month, historian Marvin Dunn could be found toiling in a garden. C. Isaiah Smalls Ii, Miami Herald, 2 Feb. 2024 Alice Mackler, who toiled in obscurity as a painter for more than 60 years before taking up sculpture and exploding onto the art scene in her 80s, died on Saturday at a hospice in Brooklyn. Will Heinrich, New York Times, 6 Feb. 2024 Meanwhile, construction workers continue to toil on new restaurants, service businesses and cleared land on the east side of McPherson. Matt Leclercq, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 30 Jan. 2024 In the early days, steelworkers toiled in extreme heat, catching steel hot rods with cotton gloves and tongs. Judith Prieve, The Mercury News, 20 Jan. 2024 For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. TIME, 5 Feb. 2024

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'toil.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Etymology

Noun (1)

Middle English toile, from Anglo-French toyl, from toiller

Verb

Middle English, to argue, struggle, from Anglo-French toiller to make dirty, fight, wrangle, from Latin tudiculare to crush, grind, from tudicula machine for crushing olives, diminutive of tudes hammer; akin to Latin tundere to beat — more at contusion

Noun (2)

Middle French toile cloth, net, from Old French teile, Latin tela cloth on a loom — more at subtle

First Known Use

Noun (1)

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Verb

15th century, in the meaning defined at intransitive sense 1

Noun (2)

circa 1529, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Time Traveler
The first known use of toil was in the 14th century

Dictionary Entries Near toil

Cite this Entry

“Toil.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toil. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Kids Definition

toil

1 of 2 noun
: long hard labor

toil

2 of 2 verb
1
: to work hard and long
2
: to go on with effort
toiling up a steep hill
toiler noun
Etymology

Noun

Middle English toile "battle, argument," derived from early French toyl, "battle, disturbance, confusion," from toiller (verb) "make dirty, fight, wrangle," from Latin tudiculare "crush, grind," from tudicula "machine with hammers for beating olives," from tudes "hammer"

Word Origin
Even though we have machines to do much of our hard work today, much long, hard toil must still be done by hand. Our Modern English word toil, however, comes from a Latin word for a laborsaving machine. The ancient Romans built a machine for crushing olives to produce olive oil. This machine was called a tudicula. This Latin word was formed from the word tudes, meaning "hammer," because the machine had little hammers to crush the olives. From this came the Latin verb tudiculare, meaning "to crush or grind." Early French used this Latin verb as the basis for its verb, spelled toiller, which meant "to make dirty, fight, wrangle." From this came the noun toyl, meaning "battle, disturbance, confusion." This early French noun in time was taken into Middle English as toile, meaning "argument, battle." The earliest sense of our Modern English toil was "a long, hard struggle in battle." It is natural enough that in time this came to be used to refer to any long hard effort.

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