hard labor
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of hard labor
First recorded in 1850–55
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Plus, there was no getting around the fact that Ernesto was getting older, less desirable for hard labor.
From Slate
It takes sustained hard labor.
Daddy wanted his sons’ existence to be easier than his own life of hard labor.
From Literature
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After the war, Faÿ was sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor, but he escaped from prison in 1951 dressed in ecclesiastical costume, with the help of—here one reaches for the phrase “incredible but true”—Toklas.
But he was “cut to the bone with hard labor,” wrote Carl Van Doren, one of his biographers, and his “Autobiography” promoted the belief that any American, through diligent labor and discipline, could prosper and advance and keep reinventing himself.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.