What does travailing mean?
Travailing means working hard, especially under difficult or prolonged conditions. It can describe a person engaged in arduous labor, as in a writer who spends years developing a book, or a difficult activity or period, as in a community's travailing efforts to recover from a disaster. The word is more literary and dramatic than working because it emphasizes toil, persistence, and strain. Although its present-participle form resembles traveling, travailing retains an association with hardship and strenuous exertion. It also has a somewhat old-fashioned literary quality, making it especially effective in formal prose, historical narrative, and descriptions of sustained struggle. In contemporary usage, however, work, toil, and struggle are often more natural choices. As a distinct form of travail, travailing is chiefly literary and is encountered less often in ordinary conversation than the more familiar traveling.
The present participle of travail, meaning to work hard or toil.
"The volunteers were travailing through the night to distribute supplies."
In this form, travailing describes an activity that is ongoing and arduous.
Characterized by hard work, prolonged effort, or difficulty.
"The committee endured a travailing week before reaching an agreement."
This attributive use is especially common in formal and literary prose.
Travailing is the literary opposite of coasting: it names effort so demanding that it feels like a journey.
Reviewed by Deb Chak, Editor. AI-assisted content curated by RJS Tech Solutions LLP.
Etymology of travailing
Travailing comes from English travail, meaning arduous labor or toil, with the historical sense of hardship or struggle that later helped give the word its association with childbirth. English travail was borrowed from Anglo-French travail, a word continuing the tradition of Latin forms referring to toil and difficulty. Its cognate forms include the noun travail and the inflected forms travails and travelled, while the present participle travailing adds the idea of continuing activity.
Related word forms
How travailing is actually used
This is a formal or literary word rather than everyday usage. It often carries a sense of prolonged, difficult effort and may imply more strain than the broader word working.
Easily confused with travailing
Traveling means moving from one place to another, whereas travailing means working hard or undergoing strenuous effort.
Travel denotes a journey or the act of journeying; travail denotes arduous labor or toil.