laborious
Americanadjective
-
requiring much work, exertion, or perseverance.
a laborious undertaking.
-
characterized by or requiring extreme care and much attention to detail.
laborious research.
-
characterized by or exhibiting excessive effort, dullness, and lack of spontaneity; labored.
a strained, laborious plot.
-
given to or diligent in work.
a careful, laborious craftsman.
- Synonyms:
- painstaking, sedulous, assiduous, industrious, hardworking
adjective
-
involving great exertion or long effort
-
given to working hard
-
(of literary style, etc) not fluent
Other Word Forms
- laboriously adverb
- laboriousness noun
- quasi-laborious adjective
- superlaborious adjective
- superlaboriousness noun
- unlaborious adjective
- unlaboriousness noun
Etymology
Origin of laborious
First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English word from Latin word labōriōsus. See labor, -ious
Explanation
Laborious describes something that requires a lot of hard work, such as Victor Frankenstein’s laborious undertaking of digging graves to find monster parts. Laborious comes from the familiar word for work, labor, which doesn’t veer far from its roots in Old French meaning "exertion of the body," and from Latin “toil, pain, exertion, fatigue.” Anything that requires blood, sweat, and tears is laborious, and while it’s usually a good thing to work hard, laborious can also describe something over-thought, such as the heavy-handed plot of a bad TV show. Think labor plus boring, said like an old-fashioned English aristocrat: luh-bohr-ee-uhs.
Vocabulary lists containing laborious
Excerpt from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
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The Great Gilly Hopkins
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Vocabulary Video Contest (2013) - List 1
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Regulatory shortcuts exist that would allow the FDA to skip the more laborious approval process.
From Salon • Apr. 4, 2026
“While we have tried to simplify the underlying concepts behind the Ontology model, building and implementing an Ontology in a large enterprise is a laborious process,” the analysts say.
From Barron's • Mar. 20, 2026
The pharma giants will still have other moats, notably the laborious regulatory and testing regime as well as distribution.
From MarketWatch • Mar. 17, 2026
She wanted to digitise and streamline those laborious tasks into a piece of tech that she can view on her cellphone or computer.
From BBC • Jan. 19, 2026
Hurriedly they went through their respective mathematics and discovered that Bill had used an elegant derivation compared to Francis’ more laborious approach.
From "Double Helix" by James D. Watson
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
