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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
labouring
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
class
▪ Although in other poems Leapor shows that labouring class women can be desperately unhappy in marriage, she is not unequivocal.
▪ Relatively little attention has been paid to the origins of labouring class poetry.
▪ Stephen Duck, however, is not the first instance of a labouring class poet in the eighteenth century.
▪ His poetry often depicts labouring class life vividly.
▪ For the most part, however, the labouring classes did not move very far.
▪ Day schooling was received by only a minority of children from the labouring classes, in some parishes a very tiny one.
▪ The claims made for these poems, however, reveal some of the difficulties in a discussion of labouring class poetry.
▪ Behind this passage may lie the assumption that labouring class poets were fundamentally impostors.
people
▪ It should, however, be observed that labouring people produced numerous prose works during this time.
▪ Negative comments on poetry written by labouring people often entailed some depreciation of labour itself.
Wiktionary
labouring

alt. (context British Canada English) (present participle of labour English) n. The act of one who labours; toil; work done. vb. (context British Canada English) (present participle of labour English)

WordNet
labouring

adj. doing arduous or unpleasant work; "drudging peasants"; "the bent backs of laboring slaves picking cotton"; "toiling coal miners in the black deeps" [syn: drudging, laboring, toiling]

Usage examples of "labouring".

Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence.

The exorcist, standing by the bed, took out his pocket ritual and the stole which he put round his neck, then a reliquary, which he placed on the bosom of the sleeping girl, and with the air of a saint he begged all of us to fall on our knees and to pray, so that God should let him know whether the patient was possessed or only labouring under a natural disease.

But ever as he grew older he thought more of her, and it pained him very much to know that even now, when he was living in comfort, with good food and rich apparel, she, to whom he owed so much, was perhaps labouring as a bondswoman under some cruel master.

Corporal List sat on the buckboard, his switch snapping the dusty, sweat-runnelled backs of the pair of oxen labouring at their yokes.

Jones was acting the most virtuous part imaginable, in labouring to preserve his fellow-creatures from destruction, the devil, or some other evil spirit, one perhaps cloathed in human flesh, was hard at work to make him completely miserable in the ruin of his Sophia.

The doubt under which I was labouring could not be cleared up for twenty-four hours, and how could I express my feverish impatience as I was longing for that happy moment!

If my reason had not been the slave of passion, I should have known that my nun could not be a different creature from all the pretty women whom I had loved for the thirteen years that I had been labouring in the fields of love.

Commonplace words of consolation, which did not allay the fearful anxiety under which I was labouring.

Charter promised political enfranchisement to the labouring people, and once enfranchised they could work out by legislation their own social salvation.

While the Egyptian fellah and the Moorish peasant were labouring in the fields, the sturdy beggars of Byzantium and Rome were amusing themselves at the circus or basking on marble in the sun.

You will comprehend, Monsieur, that there are certain physical phenomena inseparable from the contortions of a globose man labouring through unaccustomed exercises.

I made them swear upon my pocket-book that they were not labouring under any impure disease, and I concluded the ceremony by compelling Javotte to swear likewise that she had her maidenhood.

The old nuns said that I was certainly labouring under some deep sorrow, of which I had no hope to be cured except through the protection of the Holy Virgin, and the young ones asserted that I was either melancholy or misanthropic.

In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, to judge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might call the upper labouring class.