moil
Hard work.
Noun
- Hard work.
- I finally decided, my heart was really in my singing rather than in the drab, hardy soul- searing toil and moil of a collier's existence. - 1928, Harry Lauder, chapter VII, in Roamin' in the Gloamin',:
- Confusion, turmoil.
- Croft no longer saw anything clearly; he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine gun began; he was lost in a vast moil of noise out of which individual screams and shouts etched in his...
- A spot; a defilement.
- You'd suppose A finished generation, dead of plague, Swept outward from their graves into the sun, The moil of death upon them. - 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh:
Origin
From Middle English mollen (“to soften by wetting”), borrowed from Old French moillier with the same meaning, from Vulgar Latin *molliō, *molliare, from mollis (“soft”).
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Noun arts, crafts
- The glass circling the tip of a blowpipe or punty, such as the residual glass after detaching a blown vessel, or the lower part of a gather.
- The excess material which adheres to the top, base, or rim of a glass object when it is cut or knocked off from a blowpipe or punty, or from the mold-filling process. Typically removed after annealing as part of the finishing process (e.g. scored and snapped off).
- The metallic oxide from a blowpipe which has adhered to a glass object.
Origin
Of unclear origin; possibly from French meule or Hebrew מוהל (mohel, “ritual circumciser”), referring to the foreskin-like shape of the unwanted rim.
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Verb
- To toil, to work hard.
- Moil not too much underground, for the hope of mines is very uncertain, and useth to make the planters lazy in other things.. - 1625, Francis Bacon, Of Plantations:
- Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes. - 1693, John Dryden, “Tenth Satire of Juvenal”, in Juvenal and Persius:
- Why for sluggards cark and moil? - 1849, Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke's Song:
- To churn continually; to swirl.
- A crowd of men and women moiled like nightmare figures in the smoke-green haze. - 1952, Ralph Ellison, chapter 23, in Invisible Man:
- To defile or dirty.