Workload

How to spell workload

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce workload

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does workload mean?

1. nounThe amount of work that a person, team, or system is expected to do in a given period.

Workload in a sentence

• The new hire helped to ease the team's heavy workload.

• Managers should distribute the workload fairly across the department.

Where does workload come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, formed simply by joining 'work' to 'load'. Both halves are native Germanic words inherited through Old English: 'work' descends from Old English 'weorc', meaning effort, action, or the thing produced by effort, while 'load' comes from Old English 'lad', which originally meant a way or journey and later a burden carried along it (the same root that gives us 'lode' in 'lodestar'). The metaphor behind the modern word imagines tasks as a weight that a person or system must carry. 'Workload' itself is fairly recent, recorded only from the early twentieth century as industry and offices began measuring how much labour was assigned to a worker or machine. Because both parts are common everyday words, the spelling holds no real surprises beyond remembering that it is written as one solid word with no hyphen.

How the word is built

• work (labour, task)
• load (amount carried or borne)