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.
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
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
There was a time when such a brutal schedule would have seemed like pure drudgery.
From The Wall Street Journal • Sep. 25, 2025
Had he been just a little bit older and had he had to face the drudgery of programming with computer cards, he says, he would have studied science.
From "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
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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