Labour

How to spell labour

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce labour

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does labour mean?

1. nounPhysical or mental work, especially hard or tiring effort.
2. verbTo work hard or with great effort, often over a long time.
3. nounThe process of contractions and effort by which a baby is born.

Labour in a sentence

• noun

  The renovation required months of skilled labour.

• verb

  They labour for hours to clear the fallen tree from the road.

• noun

  She went into labour shortly after midnight.

• noun

  The final bill separated the cost of parts from the cost of labour.

• verb

  Researchers labour over the data long after the office had emptied.

• noun

  The midwife stayed with her throughout a long labour.

Where does labour come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin labor, which meant toil, hardship, or strenuous effort, and could even describe distress or suffering. It travelled into English through Old French, where it appeared as labour, and was firmly established in English by the 1300s as a word for hard physical work. The childbirth sense, the painful effort of delivering a baby, grew naturally out of that core idea of exertion and pain. The spelling trap is the silent -ou-: British and Canadian English preserve the Old French -our ending, while American English trimmed it back to the Latin-style -or in labor. The same root survives in relatives such as laboratory (a place of work) and elaborate (literally worked out with effort), which is a useful reminder that the o-u sits where the hard work happens.

How the word is built

• labour (from Latin labor: toil, exertion)
• -our (British noun spelling of the Latin -or ending)

British and American spelling

Labour is the British spelling. American English spells it labor.