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Drudgery, in older usage
Answer for the clue "Drudgery, in older usage ", 4 letters:
moil
Alternative clues for the word moil
Word definitions for moil in dictionaries
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Word definitions in The Collaborative International Dictionary
Moil \Moil\, v. i. [From Moil to daub; prob. from the idea of struggling through the wet.] To soil one's self with severe labor; to work with painful effort; to labor; to toil; to drudge. Moil not too much under ground. --Bacon. Now he must moil and ...
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Word definitions in Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"toil, labor," 1612, from moil (v.).
Wiktionary
Word definitions in Wiktionary
Etymology 1 n. 1 Hard work. 2 Confusion, turmoil. 3 A spot; a defilement. vb. To toil, to work hard. Etymology 2 alt. 1 (context glassblowing English) The glass circling the tip of a blowpipe or punty, such as the residual glass after detaching a blown ...
WordNet
Word definitions in WordNet
v. work hard; "She was digging away at her math homework"; "Lexicographers drudge all day long" [syn: labor , labour , toil , fag , travail , grind , drudge , dig ] be agitated; "the sea was churning in the storm" [syn: churn , boil , roil ] moisten or ...
Usage examples of moil.
From the moiling intrigue of tripping your fellow Atomist and guarding against him tripping you to the heroic thrust and parry of generals!
More armed men were moiling about a huge bonfire, eating and drinking, while the drivers of war chariots dashed madly to and fro in the throng.
Somewhere down in that moiling envelope of methane, ammonia, and hydrogen were the Corviki.
Thrusting, toiling, wailing, moiling, Frowning, preaching--such a riot!
They rose early and delivered the papers and came back home and went out to the barn where they fed the horses and afterward the mewling moiling cats and the dog and then returned to the house and washed up at the kitchen sink and ate breakfast with their father and then went out again.
The cows were moiling and bawling and the dust rose in the cold air and hung above the corrals and chutes like brown clouds of gnats swimming in schools above the cold ground.
And like noxious weeds they grew up sturdily, becoming bolder and bolder each day, exacting a bigger and bigger ransom from the fools who toiled and moiled, ever extending their thefts and marching along the road to murder.
They muttered and their surfaces moiled: arcs of cold pyrosis flared inches from them.
He spent more time studying his communications readouts, searching the bandwidths for a transmission source close enough to reach him past the moil of rock, through the disruptive barrage of static.
Behind him stood a broad reception desk and the company seal on the wall: an oblate disk filled with a moil of multihued shapes that reminded Ariel of feathers.
He watched the others in their group, and anger moiled in him for that.
Absorbed by its own concerns, the river moiled past little more than an arm's length below the grassy rim of its bank.
So they moiled and clotted, believing that the flames, the blood, the body that had died three years ago and had just now begun to live again, cried out for vengeance, not believing that the rapt infury of the flames and the immobility of the body were both affirmations of an attained bourne beyond the hurt and harm of man.
For a short time the dogs moiled, whimpering, then they set off again, fulltongued, drooling, and dragged and carried the running and cursing men at top speed back to the cabin, where, feet planted and with backflung heads and backrolled eyeballs, they bayed the empty doorway with the passionate abandon of two baritones singing Italian opera.
W’d thae be th^ simplest solution, an‘ avoid all of Sten’s moils, toils, an’ machinations?