Word.ws English Dictionary

slave away

slave away verb: to work very hard.

Verb

slave away (third-person singular simple present slaves away, present participle slaving away, simple past and past participle slaved away)

  1. (intransitive) To work very hard.
    • Rochelle is a perfectionistic, timid, dutiful girl, and she has been slaving away for hours on her math.1999, Elizabeth Berger, Raising Kids with Character: Developing Trust and Personal Integrity in Children, Rowman & Littlefield, published 2004, →ISBN, page 107
    • Thomas Anderson works at what is presumably a moderately well paying middle-class professional job, but his life as a computer programmer for a large corporation, slaving away in a tiny cubicle in a high-rise office building, seems seems mind-numbingly boring and routine.2006, M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture, Praegar, published 2006, →ISBN, page 255

Forms of slave away

third-person singular presentslaves away
present participleslaving away
past participleslaved away
pastslaved away

Questions about slave away

What does slave away mean?
Slave away means to work very hard.
What part of speech is slave away?
Slave away is a verb.
What is the past tense of slave away?
The past tense of slave away is slaved away.

Words near slave away in the dictionary

  1. slave
  2. slave ant
  3. slave ants
  4. slave auction
  5. slave auctions
  6. slave away
  7. slave boy
  8. slave boys
  9. slave bracelet
  10. slave bracelets
  11. slave breaker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: slave away (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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