Related Words
See elaborate.
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of labored
Explanation
The adjective labored is used to describe something that is difficult or requires effort to perform. If you are pregnant with triplets by the ninth month your walking will be labored. The adjective labored can describe something that is lacking natural ease or style. If you have to recite Shakespeare and you do so haltingly or self-consciously, then you have given a labored performance. If you then become really nervous and start to hyperventilate during a recitation of Hamlet's soliloquy, you will have labored breathing.
Vocabulary lists containing labored
Five Feet Apart
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The Distance Between Us
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
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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.
Last Thanksgiving, Megan Thee Stallion labored for days to prepare an elaborate holiday dinner for then-boyfriend Klay Thompson and his family.
From Salon • Apr. 30, 2026
Another concerned a sort of command center where workers labored “to make the internet as bad as we can possibly get it.”
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 23, 2026
Araceli Molar de Barrios labored in the fields for nearly 30 years after arriving in the U.S. in 1995, two years after Chavez’s death.
From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 21, 2026
Workers have labored under these unjust policies for nearly a century.
From The Wall Street Journal • Mar. 3, 2026
Though the Crepuscule was armed with but sixteen guns, the noise of their detonation was great, and as we labored to stand in the darkness, cannon blasts quaked the whole ship from strake to stringer.
From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson
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.
