Verb
workers toiling in the fields
They were toiling up a steep hill.
Recent Examples on the Web
Noun
Nearly 1,000 employees, most of them members of the Transport Workers Union Local 100, toil in concert in three daily round-the-clock shifts to overhaul as many as 1,100 cars per year.—David Waldstein, New York Times, 1 Mar. 2024 And though most of the 88% of the foreigners who populate the UAE toil at low-wage jobs, officials express confidence that year-round sun and the absence of income tax can attract the world’s top AI researchers, who are in high demand.—TIME, 20 Mar. 2024 Hirayama clearly derives enjoyment from performing his work well, but there’s more to his life than labor, and more to this movie than a simplistic celebration of manual toil.—Alissa Wilkinson, New York Times, 7 Feb. 2024 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
Verb
Shocking footage reached viewers across the globe as first responders toiled among steel and concrete beneath the water that the landmark span once bridged.—Ramon Padilla, USA TODAY, 30 Mar. 2024 Among the 15 people who work at Duffy’s is Russell’s long-time business partner Jim Fab, who still toils in the kitchen making soups and sauces and whatever else needs done, long past retirement age but unwilling to stop working.—Connie Ogle, Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 2024 For any home gardeners who spend their weekends toiling in the backyard to keep their annuals alive and shrubbery in good form, the appeal of a botanical garden is obvious.—Nicole Kliest, Vogue, 21 Mar. 2024 That’s because most of them spent their careers toiling in relative anonymity.—Mark Z. Barabak, Los Angeles Times, 14 Mar. 2024 Bands could spend years toiling away to create something half as impactful.—Jeff Yerger, SPIN, 4 Mar. 2024 At the same time, Grace Berney — a middle-age mom toiling in an obscure department at the Food and Drug Administration that regulates medical devices — gets a strange assignment.—Sarah Lyall, New York Times, 24 Feb. 2024 Those who survived the brutal voyage ended up toiling on plantations in the Americas, mostly in Brazil and the Caribbean, while others profited from their labour.—Reuters, NBC News, 27 Mar. 2024 Recently, DeBose has been toiling away on the film side of the industry.—Kyle Denis, Billboard, 27 Mar. 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
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.
Share