moil
/mɔɪl
/archaic, dialect, or North American
verb [no object]
1Work hard: men who moiled for gold...
- I rose early and sat late, I toiled and moiled, and in the sweat of my brow and of my soul I strove to gain this money, that I might have some honour among my fellow-creatures.
- He truly toiled and moiled just to accept God's will when he prayed at Gethsemane.
- But in much of the rest of the world, the willful individual, moiling away against the system, may attain nobility in some moral order but is nonetheless fated to be crushed.
2Move around in confusion or agitation: a crowd of men and women moiled in the smoky haze...
- Suddenly I noticed something happening in his face, beginning to moil and move.
- The maggots moiled about its flesh, pixellating and transforming its appearance.
noun [mass noun]
1Hard work; drudgery: this night his weekly moil is at an end...
- Shao's toil and moil was rather rewarding, and five years after his arrival, in 1852, he successfully launched his shop with a food-processing workshop at another location.
- At one level he was the small-time farmer from Ayrshire who described his early life as having ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley slave’.
- So these are matters in the moils and toils of government and likely to remain so, I suspect, for some time.
2Turmoil; confusion: the moil of his intimate thoughts
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'moisten or bedaub'): from Old French moillier 'paddle in mud, moisten', based on Latin mollis 'soft'. The sense 'work' dates from the mid 16th century, often in the phrase toil and moil.