toiled; toiling; toils
Synonyms
Examples of toil in a Sentence
Noun (1)
after years of toil in a sweatshop, Kim was finally able to start her own dressmaking business
Verb
workers toiling in the fields
They were toiling up a steep hill.
Noun (2)
a married woman hopelessly caught in the toils of an extramarital affair
Recent Examples on the Web
Bryan Alexander, USA TODAY, 14 Jan. 2025
Just Ask Xero is an AI co-pilot designed with the single purpose of reducing customer toil, or time spent on monotonous financial administration tasks.
—Jeffrey Hammond, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2024
Brian Welk, IndieWire, 7 Jan. 2025
Recent weeks have shown that whichever striker is picked will have to toil largely on his own.
—Patrick Boyland, The Athletic, 5 Jan. 2025
See all Example Sentences for toil 
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.
Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.
Noun
His innie, unaware of this grief, toils in Lumon’s enigmatic Macrodata Refinement department (MDR), disillusioned with the monotony, the secrecy and the repressiveness of Lumon’s operations.
—Bryan Alexander, USA TODAY, 14 Jan. 2025
Just Ask Xero is an AI co-pilot designed with the single purpose of reducing customer toil, or time spent on monotonous financial administration tasks.
—Jeffrey Hammond, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2024
Verb
The project will be a new take on the story, this time gender-swapping the characters to make it about a teen girl sent to the desert to toil away in the dirt.
—Brian Welk, IndieWire, 7 Jan. 2025
Recent weeks have shown that whichever striker is picked will have to toil largely on his own.
—Patrick Boyland, The Athletic, 5 Jan. 2025
See all Example Sentences for toil
Dictionary Entries Near toil
Cite this Entry
“Toil.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toil. Accessed 26 Jan. 2025.
Copy CitationKids Definition
toil
1 of 2 noun
: long hard labor
toil
2 of 2 verb1
: 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.
Love words? Need even more definitions?
Merriam-Webster unabridged
Share