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menial

UK/ˈmiːni.əl/US/ˈmiːni.əl/
adjectiveC2Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,543 of 15,258neutral

Menial means lowly and requiring no skill, said of work. Menial tasks, menial labour, menial work.

It is a judgement rather than a description, and it says as much about who is speaking as about the job — the work still has to be done, and calling it menial is how it comes to be badly paid. The word first meant belonging to a household.

Definitions of menial

  1. 1adjectivemenialLowly and requiring no skill, said of work.C2

    “He took menial jobs, washing dishes and cleaning floors, to pay for college.”

menial is a quality.

Remember it

MENIal → work that is MEAN and small

The work is mean and small, and anyone at all could do it.

hooks ontomean

Where it comes from

Anglo-Norman mesnal comes from maisnee, a household, from Latin mansio, a dwelling.

  1. Latin

    mānsiō — house

  2. Vulgar Latin

    *mānsiōnāta

  3. Anglo-Norman

    mesnal

  4. Middle English

    meyneal

  5. English, today

    menial

Built from

  • maisnee · Old French — household

From Middle English meyneal, from Anglo-Norman mesnal, from maisnee (“household”), from Vulgar Latin mānsiōnāta, from Latin mānsiō (“house”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

menial in the wild

  • A chain gang or road gang is a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment.

    Chain gang

  • The Prince Charming character has become a modern young and forceful woman, and Mr Cinders is a menial.

    Mr. Cinders

  • A chain gang is a system of labor (usually forced) that involves groups of prisoners chained together doing menial labor.

    Chain gang (disambiguation)

  • The lyrics refer to an employee doing the same menial daily tasks, and wanting to get away from it all.

    Day In Day Out (Feeder song)

  • In most situations the changes take place with little attention or care from us because we are more focused on the menial aspects of the technology.

    Technological somnambulism

1 / 2

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.

Related words

the mānsiō family

mansion

menial — used about once every 6,499 pages · #10,543 · point at the bar for the others