toiled; toiling; toils
Examples of toil in a Sentence
Noun (1)
after years of toil in a sweatshop, Kim was finally able to start her own dressmaking business
Verb
workers toiling in the fields
They were toiling up a steep hill.
Noun (2)
a married woman hopelessly caught in the toils of an extramarital affair
Recent Examples on the Web
Charles Selle, Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2026
Westerners, Arabs and Indians dominate business and finance, while laborers from poor countries in Asia and Africa toil for long hours in scorching temperatures at oil facilities and construction sites — often with few protections.
—ABC News, 4 May 2026
H.m.a. Leow, JSTOR Daily, 14 May 2026
This is, of course, nothing new to the series, and the players that don’t want to spend ages toiling away for a single car, let alone a single part, looking to simply hop on their couch and straight into a GR GT will appreciate this.
—Adam Ismail, The Drive, 14 May 2026
See All Example Sentences for toil
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Noun
Until then, they’re left with the tedious toil of prepping garden plots.
—Charles Selle, Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2026
Westerners, Arabs and Indians dominate business and finance, while laborers from poor countries in Asia and Africa toil for long hours in scorching temperatures at oil facilities and construction sites — often with few protections.
—ABC News, 4 May 2026
Verb
The roughly 1,000 Bandanese who survived were enslaved alongside other laborers under the perkenier system, where hundreds of workers toiled on each plantation (in Dutch, perk).
—H.m.a. Leow, JSTOR Daily, 14 May 2026
This is, of course, nothing new to the series, and the players that don’t want to spend ages toiling away for a single car, let alone a single part, looking to simply hop on their couch and straight into a GR GT will appreciate this.
—Adam Ismail, The Drive, 14 May 2026
See All Example Sentences for toil
Cite this Entry
“Toil.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/toil. Accessed 20 May. 2026.
Copy CitationKids Definition
toil
1 of 2 noun
: long hard labor
toil
2 of 2 verb1
: to work hard and long
2
: to go on with effort
toiling up a steep hill
toiler
noun
Etymology
Noun
Middle English toile "battle, argument," derived from early French toyl, "battle, disturbance, confusion," from toiller (verb) "make dirty, fight, wrangle," from Latin tudiculare "crush, grind," from tudicula "machine with hammers for beating olives," from tudes "hammer"
Word Origin
Even though we have machines to do much of our hard work today, much long, hard toil must still be done by hand. Our Modern English word toil, however, comes from a Latin word for a laborsaving machine. The ancient Romans built a machine for crushing olives to produce olive oil. This machine was called a tudicula. This Latin word was formed from the word tudes, meaning "hammer," because the machine had little hammers to crush the olives. From this came the Latin verb tudiculare, meaning "to crush or grind." Early French used this Latin verb as the basis for its verb, spelled toiller, which meant "to make dirty, fight, wrangle." From this came the noun toyl, meaning "battle, disturbance, confusion." This early French noun in time was taken into Middle English as toile, meaning "argument, battle." The earliest sense of our Modern English toil was "a long, hard struggle in battle." It is natural enough that in time this came to be used to refer to any long hard effort.
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