drudgery
Usage
What are other ways to say drudgery?
Drudgery suggests continuous, dreary, and dispiriting work, especially of a menial or servile kind: the drudgery of household tasks. Labor particularly denotes hard manual work: backbreaking labor; arduous labor. Toil suggests wearying or exhausting labor: toil that breaks down the worker's health. Work is the general word and may apply to exertion that is either easy or hard: fun work; heavy work.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Mr. Naiden, now a professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, gives us a vivid feeling for both the drudgery and the danger of life working on the subway.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 10, 2026
In death as in life, the only relief he can find is in the bookkeeping drudgery that has become not just his identity but his very soul.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 18, 2026
The song opens with Battle fighting against the drudgery of his nine-to-five job.
From BBC ● Mar. 6, 2026
People who ignore or undervalue prompting will remain trapped in the drudgery of manual operations, where data points must be located and assembled.
From MarketWatch ● Feb. 25, 2026
It was little more than drudgery by another name, but it was as close as women could get to real astronomy at Harvard–or indeed pretty much anywhere–in those days.
From "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
But Roth is concerned that some patients may be so eager to escape the drudgeries of dialysis that they are willing to accept a sub-par kidney.
From Scientific American ● Dec. 17, 2020
I loved these tales of going up in these famous fighters and bombers on test runs, of the camaraderie on base, even the drudgeries of guard duty or rushing to breakfast in the mess.
From BBC ● Nov. 7, 2020
“Welfare” evokes poverty as a trial of rote drudgeries.
From Washington Post ● Jan. 2, 2019
They want it to be a magical elixir that can remove them from the demands and drudgeries of the world of commerce, and it can’t.
From New York Times ● Jul. 7, 2016
We tend to count the diseases conquered, the planets explored, the drudgeries banished, and to assert that the greater good is served by seeing things our way.
From "Circumference" by Nicholas Nicastro
Vocabulary lists containing drudgery
Labor Day Lexicon: Words That Put You To Work
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The Things They Carried
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "D"
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