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Labour   /lˈeɪbˌaʊr/  /lˈeɪbər/   Listen
noun
Labor  n.  (Written also labour)  
1.
Physical toil or bodily exertion, especially when fatiguing, irksome, or unavoidable, in distinction from sportive exercise; hard, muscular effort directed to some useful end, as agriculture, manufactures, and like; servile toil; exertion; work. "God hath set Labor and rest, as day and night, to men Successive."
2.
Intellectual exertion; mental effort; as, the labor of compiling a history.
3.
That which requires hard work for its accomplishment; that which demands effort. "Being a labor of so great a difficulty, the exact performance thereof we may rather wish than look for."
4.
Travail; the pangs and efforts of childbirth. "The queen's in labor, They say, in great extremity; and feared She'll with the labor end."
5.
Any pang or distress.
6.
(Naut.) The pitching or tossing of a vessel which results in the straining of timbers and rigging.
7.
A measure of land in Mexico and Texas.
8.
(Mining.) A stope or set of stopes. (Sp. Amer.)
Synonyms: Work; toil; drudgery; task; exertion; effort; industry; painstaking. See Toll.


labour  n.  Same as labor; British spelling. (Chiefly Brit.)


verb
Labor  v. i.  (past & past part. labored; pres. part. laboring)  (Written also labour)  
1.
To exert muscular strength; to exert one's strength with painful effort, particularly in servile occupations; to work; to toil. "Adam, well may we labor still to dress This garden."
2.
To exert one's powers of mind in the prosecution of any design; to strive; to take pains.
3.
To be oppressed with difficulties or disease; to do one's work under conditions which make it especially hard, wearisome; to move slowly, as against opposition, or under a burden; to be burdened; often with under, and formerly with of. "The stone that labors up the hill." "The line too labors, and the words move slow." "To cure the disorder under which he labored." "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
4.
To be in travail; to suffer the pangs of childbirth; to be in labor.
5.
(Naut.) To pitch or roll heavily, as a ship in a turbulent sea.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Labour" Quotes from Famous Books



... view. I am conscious how much I owed, at that time, to the most helpful and judicious friend whom I could possibly have had at my elbow, Dykes Campbell. There are few pages of my manuscript which he did not read and criticise, and not a page of my proofs which he did not labour over as if it had been his own. He forced me to learn accuracy, he cut out my worst extravagances, he kept me sternly to my task. It was in writing this book under his encouragement and correction that I began to learn the ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... supply of household goods was at her door she was ready for work. A blue painter's blouse slipped over her travelling dress, her sleeves rolled well up her shapely arms, she had plunged into the labour of settling. She had for an assistant a woman whom Ellen had engaged for her, and a tall youth who was the woman's son, and these two she managed with a generalship little short ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... his serf, Vanyusha. The scarf round Vanyusha's head, his felt boots and sleepy face, seemed to be calling his master to a new life of labour, hardship, and activity. ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... wrapping an acorn in soft moss, and placing it for a pillow beneath the head of the fast fading Violet, left it to try her skill on the other flowers. A faint fragrance from the dying flower thanked her, as she turned sadly away to pursue her labour of love. It was not till she had raised and comforted all the drooping flowers and bound up their wounds, that the Fairy Violet thought of herself. Then she discovered that her delicate gossamer wings were gone! Evidently they had been caught on a crooked stick as she fell to the ground and ...
— How the Fairy Violet Lost and Won Her Wings • Marianne L. B. Ker
... shears, surgical instruments, and hundreds of other things have to be made right-handed, while palettes and a few like subsidiary objects are adapted to the left; in each case for a perfectly sufficient reason. You can't upset all this without causing confusion. More than that, the division of labour thus brought about is certainly a gain to those who possess it: for if it were not so, the ambidextrous races would have beaten the dextro-sinistrals in the struggle for existence; whereas we know that the exact ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen


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