''travail'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''travail'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250816112818-00-⌔

travail - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

travail (plural travails or travaux)

• (literary) Arduous or painful exertion; excessive labor, suffering, hardship. [from 13th c.]
  • ✤ Synonyms: toil, tribulation, ordeal
  • ✤ Antonyms: ease, leisure
  • 1582 – 1610, Douay Rheims Bible, Book of Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Sirach) XL.1–11:
    • ✤ Great trauail is created to al men, and an heauie yoke vpon the children of Adam, from the day of their comming forth of their mothers wombe, vntil the day of their burying, into the mother of al. […]
  • ✤ But as every thing of price, so this doth require travail.¹
  • ✤ * Travell and pleasure, most unlike in nature, are notwithstanding followed together by a kind of I wot not what natural conjunction […].*²
  • ✤ But I know that to-day there are great questions calling for an answer, wrongs clamoring to be righted, a people in travail that pleads for ease!³
  • ✤ He had thought of making a destiny for himself, through laborious and untiring travail.⁴
  • ✤ “Machine Madness” details the travails Rocko endures as he gets sucked into an infomercial and tries to find the perfect mail-order vacuum-cleaner, attempts to return from the laundromat with all of his socks, and finds creative ways to take out the garbage.⁵
  • ✤ And the British mandarin Left, like their contemporaries in the Foreign Office, had little time for the travails of the small countries between Germany and Russia, whom they had always regarded as something of a nuisance.⁶
  • ✤ In the most egregious examples, these stories harness a particular woman’s travails without acknowledging the systems and forces that contributed to her treatment and how these systems persist in our own time.⁷
  • ✤ Volkswagen’s travails are symbolic of the nation’s overall economic malaise and a political crisis that collapsed the government in December, paving the way for early elections Feb. 23.⁸
• Specifically, the labor of childbirth. [from 13th c.]
  • ✤ The lady shrieks and, well-a-near,
    Does fall in travail with her fear.⁹
  • ✤ And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb. And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out his hand: and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying, This came out first,¹⁰
• (obsolete, countable) An act of working; labor (US), labour (British). [14th–18th c.]
• (obsolete) The eclipse of a celestial object. [17th c.]
• Obsolete form of travel.
• Alternative form of travois (“a kind of sled”)

Verb

travail (third-person singular simple present travails, present participle travailing, simple past and past participle travailed)

• To toil.
  • ✤ [A]ll slothful persons, which will not travail for their livings, do the will of the devil.¹¹
  • ✤ The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days, and the number of years is hidden to the oppressor.¹²
  • ✤ Other poet travailing in this plain high-way of paſtoral know I none.¹³
• To go through the labor of childbirth.
  • ✤ A woman when she traveyleth hath sorowe, be cause her houre is come: but as sone as she is delivered off her chylde she remembreth no moare her anguysshe, for ioye that a man is borne in to the worlde.¹⁴
  • ✤ And they iourneyed from Bethel: and there was but a litle way to come to Ephrath; and Rachel traueiled, and she had hard labour.¹⁵

Pronunciation

• enPR: trə-vālʹ, trăvʹāl’, IPA: /tɹəˈveɪl/, /ˈtɹæˌveɪl/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊
• Hyphenation: tra‧vail
• Rhymes: -eɪl

Etymology 1

🖼️ ➺

Possible appearance of a tripalium

Inherited from Middle English travail, borrowed from Old French travail (“suffering, torment”), deverbal from travailler, from Vulgar Latin ﹡tripāliāre (“to torment”), from Latin tripālium (“torture device”) + -āre (verb-forming suffix). Doublet of travel and travois.

Etymology 2

From Middle English travailen, from Old French travailler, from the noun (see above). Doublet of travel. Displaced native Middle English swinken (“to work”) (from Old English swincan (“to labour, to toil, to work at”)).

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

1. 1597, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book V, §21: ↩

2. 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 20, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC: ↩

3. 1919, Stanley J. Weyman, “XIII Peter Pauper”, in The Great House: ↩

4. 1936, Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Faber & Faber, published 2007, page 38: ↩

5. 1995, Catherine Applefeld, “Video Previews”, in Billboard ‎${}^{[1]}$, volume 107, number 2, page 51: ↩

6. 2005, Tony Judt, “Culture Wars”, in Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage Books, published 2010, →ISBN: ↩

7. 2022 March 31, Alexis Soloski, “Why the Sudden Urge to Reconsider Famous Women?”, in The New York Times ‎${}^{[2]}$, →ISSN: ↩

8. 2025 January 27, Lenora Chu, “How Volkswagen slid from German engineering icon to innovation laggard”, in The Christian Science Monitor: ↩

9. c. 1607–1608 (date written), William Shakespeare, [George Wilkins?], The Late, and Much Admired Play, Called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. […], London: […] [William White and Thomas Creede] for Henry Gosson, […], published 1609, →OCLC, [Act III, scene chorus]: ↩

10. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Genesis 38:27–28: ↩

11. 1552, Hugh Latimer, Fourth Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer, Preached before Lady Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk: ↩

12. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Job 15:20: ↩

13. 1714, J[ohn] Gay, “The Proeme to the Courteous Reader”, in The Shepherd’s Week. In Six Pastorals, London: […] R. Burleigh […], →OCLC: ↩

14. 1526, [William Tyndale, transl.], The Newe Testamẽt […] (Tyndale Bible), [Worms, Germany: Peter Schöffer], →OCLC, John: ↩

15. 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Genesis 35:16: ↩

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