laborious

UK/ləˈbɔːɹiəs/US/ləˈbɔːɹiəs/

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,708 of 15,258leans written

Laborious means needing long hard effort. A laborious process, laborious work, laborious prose.

Applied to writing it is a criticism of a different kind — laborious prose is heavy going for the reader, whatever it cost the writer. It says the effort is visible. Note labour, from the Latin for toil, and the American spelling labor beside it.

Definitions of laborious

1adjectivelaboriousNeeding long hard effort.C1
“Copying the old records by hand was a slow and laborious job.”

laborious is a quality of effort.

Where it comes from

Latin laboriosus comes from labor, toil or hardship. Labour and elaborate come from the same toil.

Latin
laboriosus
Old French
laborios
English, today
laborious

From Old French laborios, from Latin laboriosus. by surface analysis, en + labor + -ious

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

laborious in the wild

During the 19th century, threshers and mechanical reapers and reaper-binders gradually became widespread and made grain production much less laborious.
Threshing machine
BACs were replaced with faster and less laborious sequencing methods like whole genome shotgun sequencing and now more recently next-gen sequencing.
Bacterial artificial chromosome
Through the classical influence on contemporary culture, tasks that are laborious, futile, and never-ending are therefore often described as Sisyphean ().
Sisyphus
MUD players may run bots to automate laborious tasks, which can sometimes make up the bulk of the gameplay.
Video game bot
Intensely laborious when using ancient tools and methods, rock-cut architecture was presumably combined with quarrying the rock for use elsewhere.
Rock-cut architecture

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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