Word.ws English Dictionary

belabouring

belabouring is the present participle and gerund of belabour.

Meaning of belabour

Verb

belabour (third-person singular simple present belabours, present participle belabouring, simple past and past participle belaboured)

  1. (UK, obsolete, transitive) To labour about; labour over; to work hard upon; to ply diligently.
  2. (UK, transitive) To beat or thump (someone) soundly.
    • 1856: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Part III Chapter X, translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling
      He saw the village; he was seen coming bending forward upon his horse, belabouring it with great blows, the girths dripping with blood.
    Synonyms:
    buffet, thrash
  3. (UK, transitive) To attack (someone) verbally.
  4. (UK, transitive) To discuss or explain (something) excessively or repeatedly; to harp on or overelaborate.
    • Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belabouring those problems which divide us.1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, inaugural speech

Phrases with belabouring

Questions about belabouring

What is belabouring the present participle and gerund of?
Belabouring is the present participle and gerund of belabour.

Words near belabouring in the dictionary

  1. belaboured the point
  2. belabouredly
  3. belabourer
  4. belabourers
  5. belaboureth
  6. belabouring
  7. belabouring the point
  8. belabours
  9. belabours the point
  10. belacan
  11. belace

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: belabouring (page history and authors); belabour (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “belabouring.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/belabouring. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.