These words refer to the effort required to accomplish a task, whether physical or mental. Labour most immediately suggests physical effort: the labour it would take to improvise a rope bridge across the chasm. From this sense, the word has become an abstraction for such effort: estimating that two-thirds of the repair bill went for labour . The word also refers to a working force, whether unionized or not: a meeting between labour and management. An older sense of the word refers to childbirth: attended by a nurse during labour . The word can refer to strictly mental effort, in which case it suggests unusual difficulty: weeks of labour to get the accounts to balance; the gruelling labour he put in on his master’s thesis. Work can apply to any situation in which either a short-term or recurring task is performed: It took hard work to get the car out of the rutted street; depressions that throw thousands out of work . In a related use, the word can apply to the result of someone’s labours : his life’s work ; a book that was the work of a distinguished group of scholars. It can also apply to something, as machinery, designed for a special function; this usually requires the plural: waterworks ; the works of a clock.

Toil emphasizes the difficulty of the work it pertains to, but it is less often used now except for a high-toned effect, possibly specious: the toil of our forefathers to build a stronger nation; mothers whose toil to better their children often goes unrewarded. Yakka (also spelt yakker , yacker ) is an Australian slang term for work or toil , usually being limited to that demanding physical energy: Cane-cutting is hard yakka. Travail emphasizes actual suffering, mainly because of its reference, like labour , to the pains of childbirth. Travail is, however, distinctly precious in sound and pseudo-poetical even in reference to childbirth, where the greater simplicity of labour gives both strength and dignity. In some contexts, particularly metaphorical, the word may nonetheless be useful: still unenlightened about the futility of war after centuries of travail .

Drudgery emphasize work that is uninspiring, unpleasant or arduous; it may suggest physical work on a menial level, but can apply to any dull and unrewarding task. Unlike some other words here, drudgery need not suggest hard or exhausting labour so much as unrelieved monotony: machines to take much of the drudgery out of manual labour ; the unrelenting drudgery of exam week. Grind is in some ways an intensification of drudgery , but it particularly emphasizes work done under pressure in a dehumanizing routine way, whether physical or mental; it suggests the never-ending and unrelenting quality of such labour done over a long period of time: the twelve-hour grind of coal miners at the turn of the century; the daily grind of the office worker.