Wiktionary

travail

EnglishEdit

Alternative formsEdit

PronunciationEdit

  • enPR: trə-vālʹ, trăvʹāl', IPA(key): /tɹəˈveɪl/, /ˈtɹævˌeɪl/
  • Audio (Southern England)(file)
  • Rhymes: -eɪl

Etymology 1Edit

PIE word
*tréyes
 
Possible appearance of a Tripalium

From Middle English travail, from Old French travail (“suffering, torment”), from Vulgar Latin *tripaliō (“to torture; suffer, toil”) from Late Latin trepālium (“an instrument of torture”) from Latin tripālis (“held up by three stakes”) from Proto-Italic *trēs + *pākslos from Proto-Indo-European *peh₂ǵ-. Doublet of travel.

NounEdit

travail (plural travails or travaux)

  1. (literary) Arduous or painful exertion; excessive labor, suffering, hardship. [from 13th c.]
    • 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. […]
    • 1597, Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book V, §21:
      But as every thing of price, so this doth require travail.
    • 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 20, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], OCLC 946730821:
      Travell and pleasure, most unlike in nature, are notwithstanding followed together by a kind of I wot not what natural conjunction […].
    • 1936, Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Faber & Faber 2007, p. 38:
      He had thought of making a destiny for himself, through laborious and untiring travail.
    • 2005, Tony Judt, “Culture Wars”, in Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage Books, published 2010, →ISBN:
      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.
    • 2022 March 31, Alexis Soloski, “Why the Sudden Urge to Reconsider Famous Women?”, in The New York Times‎[1], ISSN 0362-4331:
      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.
  2. Specifically, the labor of childbirth. [from 13th c.]
  3. (obsolete, countable) An act of working; labor (US), labour (British). [14th–18th c.]
  4. (obsolete) The eclipse of a celestial object. [17th c.]
  5. Obsolete form of travel.
  6. Alternative form of travois (“a kind of sled”)
Related termsEdit
English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *peh₂ǵ-‎ (0 c, 20 e)
TranslationsEdit
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked
ReferencesEdit

Etymology 2Edit

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

VerbEdit

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

  1. To toil.
  2. To go through the labor of childbirth.
TranslationsEdit
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

Further readingEdit

FrenchEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Middle French travail, from the singular form from Old French travail from Vulgar Latin *tripaliō (“to torture; suffer, toil”) from Late Latin trepālium (“an instrument of torture”) from Latin tripālis (“held up by three stakes”). Compare Occitan trabalh, Catalan treball, English travail, Italian travaglio, Portuguese trabalho, Spanish trabajo.

The plural from Old French travauz, from travailz with l-vocalization before a consonant. The final -auz was later spelled -aux, and the sequence -au-, which once represented a diphthong, now represents an o sound.

PronunciationEdit

NounEdit

travail m (plural travaux or travails)

  1. work; labor
    un travail bien fait ― work done well, a job well done
    On se met au travail. ― Let's get to work.
    Remettez-vous au travail. ― Do get to work.
    Il se plonge dans le travail. ― (please add an English translation of this usage example)
  2. job
  3. workplace

Usage notesEdit

  • The less common plural travails is usually only used for the sense of "job."

SynonymsEdit

Derived termsEdit

Further readingEdit

Middle FrenchEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Old French travail.

NounEdit

travail m (plural travails)

  1. suffering; pain

DescendantsEdit

  • French: travail

ReferencesEdit

  • Godefroy, Frédéric, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle (1881) (travail, supplement)

Old FrenchEdit

EtymologyEdit

From Vulgar Latin *tripaliō (“to torture; suffer, toil”) from Late Latin trepālium (“an instrument of torture”) from Latin tripālis (“held up by three stakes”). Compare Occitan trabalh, Catalan treball, Italian travaglio, Portuguese trabalho, Spanish trabajo.

NounEdit

travail m (oblique plural travauz or travailz, nominative singular travauz or travailz, nominative plural travail)

  1. suffering, torment

DescendantsEdit

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