labor
Usage
What are other ways to say labor?
Labor particularly denotes hard manual work: backbreaking labor; arduous labor. Drudgery suggests continuous, dreary, and dispiriting work, especially of a menial or servile kind: the drudgery of household tasks. 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:
Hours before she went into labor, she was diagnosed with what she called “a little bit” of breast cancer.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 26, 2026
In the early atomic age, the division of labor between the public and private sectors was also up for grabs.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 25, 2026
Yet breaking into the labor market can be a tough job, regardless of whether your skills can be replaced by AI.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 25, 2026
“You tell the customer, with labor, it’s around $100. That’s a lot for an oil change,” Alhumaidi said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 25, 2026
Along with sugar and tobacco, rice demands intense, backbreaking labor.
From "In the Shadow of Liberty" by Kenneth C. Davis
“I don’t like using the word ‘bucket list,’ but all these things are labors of love,” Hoffs says.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 4, 2026
At Schaeffler, Digit labors alone inside a Plexiglas cage, moving baskets for four hours, recharging over lunch, then going again for another four hours.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 15, 2026
In New York, this month brings a wealth of opportunities to appreciate the fruits of these labors, principally at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual festival of film preservation, “To Save and Project.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 14, 2026
The hivemind refuses to hurt or kill any living being, states its preference for vegetarianism and merrily labors to care for the few who aren’t like them.
From Salon ● Nov. 26, 2025
The cannonade which had disturbed our labors being at an end, the corporal called to us to continue our binding of chevaux de frise, which labor we undertook again in silence.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
Fields’s opening sentence spans 26 words, yet it never sounds labored.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 18, 2026
The noise of backhoes, cranes and bulldozers echoed across Colombia's quake-hit cities on Sunday as workers labored to remove rubble, though the chance of finding survivors was slim a week after the disaster.
From Barron's ● Aug. 17, 2026
Cooper has long labored with a bureaucratic disadvantage: he lacks the easy access that Caine has to the Oval Office.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 29, 2026
Last Thanksgiving, Megan Thee Stallion labored for days to prepare an elaborate holiday dinner for then-boyfriend Klay Thompson and his family.
From Salon ● Apr. 30, 2026
Meggie turned hesitantly to look at him as Elinor's car labored up the last hill.
From "Inkheart" by Cornelia Funke
That, plus his aversion to economic ideology, helped craft a reputation for the Fed as an independent, technocratic institution laboring to do a good job for the American people.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 22, 2026
A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 22, 2026
You probably know it already — you’ve seen oil pumpjacks laboring away in nutty places, like on the La Cienega Boulevard shortcut through Baldwin Hills to the airport.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 26, 2026
This base allowed to soar last Sunday’s spire of victory at another Jack Hughes’s laboring hand.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 27, 2026
As dinnertime approached she began the nightly routine of laboring over the hot woodstove, feeding kindling into the firebox, trying to get enough flame to draw a draft up the chimney.
From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown
Vocabulary lists containing labor
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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Labor Day Lexicon: Words That Put You To Work
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Working Together: The Language of Unions
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