Meaning of Travail | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Arduous or painful exertion; excessive labor, suffering, hardship.
   literary
2. Specifically, the labor of childbirth.
3. An act of working; labor (US), labour (British).
   countable, obsolete
4. The eclipse of a celestial object.
   obsolete

Equivalents

Examples

“Great trauail is created to al men, and an heauie yoke vpon the children of Adam, from the day of their comming forth of their mothers wombe, vntil the day of their burying, into the mother of al. […]”

“But as every thing of price, so this doth require travail.”

“Travell and pleasure, most unlike in nature, are notwithstanding followed together by a kind of I wot not what natural conjunction[…].”

“But I know that to-day there are great questions calling for an answer, wrongs clamoring to be righted, a people in travail that pleads for ease!”

“He had thought of making a destiny for himself, through laborious and untiring travail.”

“And the British mandarin Left, like their contemporaries in the Foreign Office, had little time for the travails of the small countries between Germany and Russia, whom they had always regarded as something of a nuisance.”

“In the most egregious examples, these stories harness a particular woman’s travails without acknowledging the systems and forces that contributed to her treatment and how these systems persist in our own time.”

“Volkswagen’s travails are symbolic of the nation’s overall economic malaise and a political crisis that collapsed the government in December, paving the way for early elections Feb. 23.”

“The lady shrieks and, well-a-near, Does fall in travail with her fear.”

“And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold, twins were in her womb. And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out his hand: and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet thread, saying, This came out first,”

CEFR level