TOILSOME

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does toilsome mean? 

• TOILSOME (adjective)
  The adjective TOILSOME has 1 sense:

1. characterized by effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort

  Familiarity information: TOILSOME used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• TOILSOME (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Characterized by effort to the point of exhaustion; especially physical effort

Synonyms:

arduous; backbreaking; grueling; gruelling; hard; heavy; laborious; operose; punishing; toilsome

Context example:

set a punishing pace

Similar:

effortful (requiring great physical effort)

Derivation:

toilsomeness (the quality of requiring extended effort)

 Context examples 

Often, when wearied by a toilsome march, I persuaded myself that I was dreaming until night should come and that I should then enjoy reality in the arms of my dearest friends.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

It was a toilsome march over broken ground and through snow, which came often as high as the knee, yet ere the sun had begun to sink they had reached the spot where the gorge opens out on to the uplands of Navarre, and could see the towers of Pampeluna jutting up against the southern sky-line.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The feeling with which I used to watch the tramps, as they came into the town on those wet evenings, at dusk, and limped past, with their bundles drooping over their shoulders at the ends of sticks, came freshly back to me; fraught, as then, with the smell of damp earth, and wet leaves and briar, and the sensation of the very airs that blew upon me in my own toilsome journey.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

Promising to be with them the whole of the following morning, therefore, she closed the fatigues of the present by a toilsome walk to Camden Place, there to spend the evening chiefly in listening to the busy arrangements of Elizabeth and Mrs Clay for the morrow's party, the frequent enumeration of the persons invited, and the continually improving detail of all the embellishments which were to make it the most completely elegant of its kind in Bath, while harassing herself with the never-ending question, of whether Captain Wentworth would come or not?

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)