INDUSTRIOUS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does industrious mean? 

• INDUSTRIOUS (adjective)
  The adjective INDUSTRIOUS has 2 senses:

1. characterized by hard work and perseverance

2. working hard to promote an enterprise

  Familiarity information: INDUSTRIOUS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• INDUSTRIOUS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Characterized by hard work and perseverance

Synonyms:

hardworking; industrious; tireless; untiring

Similar:

diligent (characterized by care and perseverance in carrying out tasks)

Derivation:

industriousness; industry (persevering determination to perform a task)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Working hard to promote an enterprise

Synonyms:

energetic; gumptious; industrious; up-and-coming

Similar:

enterprising (marked by imagination, initiative, and readiness to undertake new projects)

Derivation:

industriousness; industry (persevering determination to perform a task)

 Context examples 

It had been real business, relative to the renewal of a lease in which the welfare of a large and—he believed—industrious family was at stake.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

For a man who conducts himself well, repeated Mrs. Micawber, with her clearest business manner, and is industrious.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

You are an industrious soul and are rarely known to take much time for yourself.

(AstrologyZone.com, by Susan Miller)

Once upon a time there was a widow who had two daughters; one of them was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy.

(Fairy Tales, by The Brothers Grimm)

But it takes time to make a raft, even when one is as industrious and untiring as the Tin Woodman, and when night came the work was not done.

(The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum)

My scholar has been left very poor, but he is hard-working and industrious.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I'm proud to shake this good, industrious little hand, and hope I shall not soon be asked to give it away.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterwards; Eliza sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

I am practically industrious—painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour—but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)