Middle English (in the senses 'contend verbally' and 'strife'): from Anglo-Norman French toiler 'strive, dispute', toil 'confusion', from Latin tudiculare 'stir about', from tudicula 'machine for crushing olives', related to tundere 'crush'.

• toilet from mid 16th century:

  A toilet was originally a cloth used as a wrapper for clothes or a covering for a dressing table, from French toilette ‘cloth, wrapper’. From the first meaning developed a group of senses relating to dressing and washing, including ‘the process of washing, dressing, and attending to your appearance’, now rather dated, which is also expressed in the French form toilette. In the 18th century it was fashionable for a lady to receive visitors during the later stages of her ‘toilet’, which led to uses such as this by the dramatist Sir Richard Steele in 1703: ‘You shall introduce him to Mrs Clerimont's Toilet.’ People started using the word for a dressing room, and, in the USA, one with washing facilities. It was not until the early 20th century that it became a particular item of plumbing, namely a lavatory. See also loo. The French word was a diminutive of toile, used for a type of dress fabric since the late 18th century, and of toils (mid 16th century) for entrapment, a figurative use of an earlier sense, ‘net’. Toil in the sense of hard work in Middle English has had a bad reputation from the start, as it was originally used to mean ‘strife, quarrel, battle’, and from then came to be used for something unpleasantly hard. It comes via French from Latin tudiculare ‘stir about’.