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
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.
Everyone I spoke with described the current process of tracing foodborne illnesses as laborious and slow and hampered by an absence of a unified approach.
From Slate ● Jul. 22, 2026
Exhausting, laborious, oppressive, but three points and hope.
From BBC ● Jun. 14, 2026
I do fear that if you start selling your friends’ goods without their help, the sale will begin to feel more laborious than fun.
From MarketWatch ● May 28, 2026
If that makes the outcome seem like a foregone conclusion, it ain’t necessarily so, thanks to Labour’s laborious internal democratic process.
From Salon ● May 12, 2026
The school didn’t have its students learn programming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960s.
From "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
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.
