belabor

verb

be·la·bor | \ bi-ˈlā-bər

, bē-\

belabored; belaboring; belabors

Definition of belabor

1a : to attack verbally If I had been ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once belabored me in his feeble way.— Oliver Wendell Holmes

b : to beat soundly … ancient battles in which the combatants belabored one another with swords, staffs, cudgels, halberds and other heavy-duty weapons until the blood flowed …— James Rogers

2 : to explain or insist on excessively her habit of belaboring the obvious He needlessly belabored the point.

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Examples of belabor in a Sentence

Her habit of belaboring the obvious makes her a very boring speaker. Please don't belabor the point. He uses his newspaper column to belabor writers for even the most minor grammatical errors.

Recent Examples on the Web

Tell her a piece of good news, like a job promotion, and her first impulse is to belabor how bad job security is, how much hard work managing people might be, etc. — Carolyn Hax, The Mercury News, "Carolyn Hax: She turns my good news into something bad," 24 June 2019 Tell her a piece of good news, such as a job promotion, and her first impulse is to belabor how bad job security is, how much hard work managing people might be, etc. — Washington Post, "Carolyn Hax: You and your constantly negative mom may have more in common than it seems," 24 June 2019 Tell her a piece of good news, like a job promotion, and her first impulse is to belabor how bad job security is, how much hard work managing people might be, etc. — Carolyn Hax, oregonlive.com, "Carolyn Hax: Keep calling, but stop resisting, negative Mom," 23 June 2019 The hands of the designer working and reworking it to perfected beauty and the hands of the many artisans who cut, stitched, embroidered, embellished, and belabored it. — Jordan Roth, Vogue, "Jordan Roth: A Man’s View on the Haute Couture," 28 Jan. 2019 There’s also a new trailer: And the belabored Bloodstained slipped its release date again. — Hayden Dingman, PCWorld, "This week in games: Gabe Newell struggles with "triple kill" and BattleTech announces its first expansion," 24 Aug. 2018 Walz knows all of this, and also that there's no point in belaboring calls made eight weeks ago. — Tim Sullivan, The Courier-Journal, "NCAA's lash leaves no mark on U of L's women's coach Jeff Walz," 26 May 2018 But, that doesn't mean the episode won't belabor the point. — Rebecca Farley, refinery29.com, "The Bachelorette Season 14, Episode 3 Recap: A Skeleton Of A Man," 12 June 2018 Not to belabor the point, but this is a guy who is always going to be among the league leaders in putting the ball in play. — Michael Beller, SI.com, "Andrelton Simmons Is The Hardest Player to Strike Out in the Big Leagues," 12 June 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'belabor.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.