menial

The Muslim-majority region, battling some of India's highest unemployment rates, has become increasingly dependent on outsiders to perform jobs that many locals consider menial, including domestic work, agriculture and construction.

From Barron's ● Sep. 14, 2026

Elliot runs around LA doing Erika’s menial tasks until he drops everything at her beck and call.

From Salon ● Jul. 31, 2026

Sometimes he would give her menial tasks to do: answer the phone, show someone to a meeting room, or announce a guest.

From BBC ● Jul. 18, 2026

It’s a grisly, funny ritual in which they reveal the self-disgust that their menial jobs have inculcated in them.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 28, 2026

Dragging her fatherless child from place to place, scraping by on menial jobs, justifying it by insisting to herself—by insisting to everyone—she was making Art.

From "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng

If Snyder’s idea of running a franchise was to send menials scurrying for more whiskey ice, the other owners were happy to accept the free if sloppy proceeds.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 26, 2020

If our children become accustomed to bossing around their mechanical menials without so much as a please or a thank you, will they turn into adults we can’t stand?

From The New Yorker ● Nov. 19, 2018

“It would be menials who would win this war,” Juliet tells herself just before she’s plucked from the rank-and-file MI5 office staff stationed in the old Wormwood Scrubs prison at the beginning of the war.

From Slate ● Sep. 25, 2018

If schools such as Syracuse and Tennessee are having trouble scraping off the mud, it’s not just because they’ve been dirtied by a few menials.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 9, 2015

Were there menials, I wondered, whom I should never know, never see, waiting behind kitchen doors for the gift of our breakfast?

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier