Other forms: travails
Travail is painful and laborious effort. Years of travail, the travails of the journey, after much travail.
It also means the labour of childbirth, which is its oldest English sense. It is a doublet of travel: journeys were once so hard that one word covered both, and English kept the pair with the meanings split.
1nountravailPainful and laborious effort.
“After years of travail, the explorers finally reached the coast.”
travail is hard effort.
Old French travail means suffering or toil. Travel is the same word, from a time when journeys were an ordeal.
Old French
travail — suffering, torment
Middle English
travail
English, today
travail
From Middle English travail, from Old French travail (“suffering, torment”). a doublet of travel and travois.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA