toil
Usage
What are other ways to say toil?
Toil suggests wearying or exhausting labor: toil that breaks down the worker's health. 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. 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.
This is an incredible start to their adult life; most working people take years of toil to get to that level.
From MarketWatch • Jul. 10, 2026
Better, he figured, to find ways to bring in income now than toil without certainty of success.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 25, 2026
She started working at the pharmacy aged 15, and has cherished memories and friends from her decades of toil.
From BBC • May 31, 2026
Most toil on the building sites of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia or in hotels and factories there, while others work in India and Malaysia.
From Barron's • Feb. 16, 2026
Flappily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered.
From "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
Vocabulary lists containing toil
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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Labor Day Lexicon: Words That Put You To Work
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Animal Farm
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