adjective

• Involving hard or tedious work.

  ‘toilsome chores’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The specialized work seems interesting to outsiders but is actually toilsome, hard and even dangerous.’
  • ‘The problem is that young people regard carving as a toilsome and profitless job.’
  • ‘It preferred these short-cut means to the more toilsome efforts of building up a base through good governance, social reforms and ideological education of the cadres.’
  • ‘Marx, though critical of industrial capitalism, also maintained a belief that machines would eventually liberate man from the toilsome qualities of human labor.’
  • ‘His chief work was done in his study, where he was constantly to be found in an arm-chair with his writing board resting across his arms, engrossed in toilsome arithmetical or analytic processes.’

  Synonyms

  onerous, oppressive, troublesome, weighty, worrisome, vexatious, irksome, trying, crushing, inconvenient, awkward, a nuisance