Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • intransitive verb To work hard; toil.
  • intransitive verb To churn about continuously.
  • noun Hard work; toil.
  • noun Confusion; turmoil.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Defilement.
  • noun Labor; drudgery.
  • noun A mule.
  • To wet; moisten.
  • To soil; dirty; daub.
  • To fatigue by labor; weary.
  • To soil one's self; wallow in dirt.
  • To drudge; labor; toil.
  • noun A kind of high shoe.
  • noun In glass-making, the metallic oxid adhering to the glass which is broken from the end of the blowpipe.
  • noun A tool occasionally used by miners in certain districts instead of a pick when accurate cutting is to be done.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • intransitive verb To soil one's self with severe labor; to work with painful effort; to labor; to toil; to drudge.
  • transitive verb To daub; to make dirty; to soil; to defile.
  • noun A spot; a defilement.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun glassblowing An unwanted rim of glass left after blow molding.
  • verb To toil, to work hard.
  • verb To churn continually.
  • noun Hard work.
  • noun Confusion, turmoil.
  • noun A spot; a defilement.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • verb moisten or soil
  • verb be agitated
  • verb work hard

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English mollen, to soften by wetting, from Old French moillier, from Vulgar Latin *molliāre, from Latin mollia (pānis), the soft part (of bread), from neuter pl. of mollis, soft; see mel- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Hebrew 'mohel', מוהל (ritual circumciser), referring to the foreskin-like shape of the unwanted rim.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English mollen ("to soften by wetting"), from Old French moillier with the same meaning, from Latin molla panis ("soft part of bread"), from mollis ("soft"); from the Proto-Indo-European root 'mel-', 'soft'.

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Examples

  • Un Lun Dun is set, for the most part, in an alternate London, a place where all the "moil" of the real London goes, the moil being everything that's broken, discarded, or obsolete.

    Archive 2007-06-17 Bill Crider 2007

  • But 's tued an 'moil'd' issén deäd, an '' e died a good un, 'e did.

    The Book of Humorous Verse Various 1902

  • IT IS a sad world wherein the millions of the stupid lowly are compelled to toil and moil at the making of all manner of commodities that can be and are on occasion destroyed in an instant by the hot breath of war.

    Mexico's Army and Ours 2010

  • "When he had the news from the village, he had the gates closed at once, and forbade anyone from the Castle to go down, for fear of being caught up in the moil."

    Sick Cycle Carousel 2010

  • And it pleases him to have me willing, not skulking and sulking like a a…moodiwart, a moil, mole.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • And it pleases him to have me willing, not skulking and sulking like a a…moodiwart, a moil, mole.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • And it pleases him to have me willing, not skulking and sulking like a a…moodiwart, a moil, mole.

    Wildfire Sarah Micklem 2009

  • In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings.

    Lew Rockwell: Soviet-Style Rule in Iraq 2008

  • In ceaseless toil and moil, the military will be without any means of testing its bearings.

    Lew Rockwell: Soviet-Style Rule in Iraq 2008

  • The classic ballad of the Klondike gold rush can still thrill children (and their parents) with lines like: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun/By the men who moil for gold …”

    Books in a Sentence « One-Minute Book Reviews 2006

Comments

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  • http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moil says that moil was their word of the day on that most infamous day. When you read the meaning of this word it speaks for itself.

    February 1, 2007

  • In glassmaking, the moil is the unwanted top of a blown object. At the last stage in the forming process when the object is removed from the blowpipe, the glassmaker is left with a narrow opening that he/she does not want. After annealing the object, the glassmaker removes the top, usually by cracking off. The moil from a mold-blown object is often known as an overblow.

    November 9, 2007

  • I'm glad reesetee's citation was about glassmaking.

    July 23, 2008

  • Most of the words on that glassmaking list inspire that reaction, bilby. :-)

    July 29, 2008

  • I live near Moil, a suburb named after an Aboriginal tribe.

    July 29, 2008

  • Often used, poetically, in the phrase "toil and moil".

    July 31, 2008

  • "A tool occasionally used by miners in certain districts instead of a pick when accurate cutting is to be done. The moil (also called a set) is usually made of drill-steel, about two and a half feet long, and pointed at the end like a gad. The gad, however, is short, and intended to be struck with the hammer; the moil is held and worked in the hand, like a short crowbar."

    --Cent. Dict.

    September 6, 2012