Word.ws English Dictionary

labourous

labourous is the obsolete form of laborious.

Meaning of laborious

Adjective

laborious (comparative more laborious, superlative most laborious)

  1. Requiring much physical effort; toilsome.
    • Let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.1943 November – 1944 February (date written; published 1945 August 17), George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter I, in Animal Farm […], London: Secker & Warburg, published May 1962...
  2. Mentally difficult; painstaking.
  3. Industrious.
    • All, with united Force, combine to drive / The lazy Drones from the laborious Hive.1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC, page 129...

Forms of labourous

comparativemore labourous
superlativemost labourous

Origin of labourous

From labour + -ous.

Words formed from labourous

Questions about labourous

What is labourous the obsolete form of?
Labourous is the obsolete form of laborious.

Words near labourous in the dictionary

  1. labouristic
  2. labourists
  3. labourite
  4. labourites
  5. labourless
  6. labourous
  7. labourously
  8. labours
  9. labours of love
  10. labours the point
  11. laboursaving

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: labourous (page history and authors); laborious (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: “labourous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/labourous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.