Other forms: toiled, toiling, toils
Toil is long hard exhausting work. Years of toil, toil away, the toil of it.
It is heavier than work and more thankless than effort: toil implies grinding physical labour over time, and the word is old-fashioned enough now to sound deliberate. As a verb it takes away or at: toiling away, toiling at the accounts. Note toilsome; and that the unrelated word toilet comes from a different French root entirely, meaning a little cloth.
1nountoilLong hard exhausting work.
“After years of toil on the farm, his hands were rough and scarred.”
2verbworkTo work long and hard.
“The miners toiled underground from dawn until dusk.”
toil is hard labour.
Middle English toilen appears to blend an Anglo-Norman word meaning to stir up or entangle with an English one meaning to till the soil. The two senses converged on hard labour.
Anglo-Norman
toiller — to agitate, stir up, entangle
Middle English
toilen, toylen
English, today
toil
From Middle English toilen, toylen, apparently a conflation of Anglo-Norman toiller (“to agitate, stir up, entangle”) (compare fro-nor tooillier, tooullier (“to agitate, stir”); of unknown origin), and Middle English tilyen, telien, teolien, tolen, tolien, tulien (“to till, work, labour”), from Old English tilian, telian, teolian, tiolian (“to exert oneself, toil, work, make, generate, strive after, try, endeavor, procure, obtain, gain, provide, tend, cherish, cultivate, till, plough, trade, traffic, aim at, aspire to, treat, cure”) (compare Middle Dutch tuylen, teulen (“to till, work, labour”)), from Proto-Germanic tilōną (“to strive, reach for, aim for, hurry”). Cognate with Scots tulyie (“to quarrel, flite, contend”). An alternate etymology derives Middle English toilen, toylen directly from Middle Dutch tuylen, teulen (“to work, labour, till”), from tuyl "agriculture, labour, toil"; > Modern Dutch tuil (“toil; work”). Cognate with Old Frisian teula (“to labour, toil”), teule (“labour, work”), Dutch tuil (“toil, labour”). Compare also Dutch telen (“to grow; raise; cultivate, till”). More at till.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA