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Definition
a difficult experience — especially one involving hard work or painMuch less commonly, travail can refer to a woman in labor during the birth of a baby.
- a time of economic travail
- Lines formed in his face, and in those lines were the travail of the North, the bite of the frost, all that he had achieved and sufferedJack London -- Burning Daylight
- Is all our travail turn'd to this effect?William Shakespeare -- King Henry VI, Part 1
- Here's the beginning of love at the end of our travail.Ian McEwan -- Atonement
- One's own personal doings look small indeed, when faced with the momentous travails of History, which we can only trust are for the greater good.Margaret Atwood -- Alias Grace
- The queen had to find another defender or today's ordeal would be the least of her travails.George R.R. Martin -- A Dance With Dragons
- Come Lord, and gather of the fruits of thy travail and thy pleading.George Eliot -- Adam Bede
- God safely quit her of her burden, and With gentle travail, to the gladding of Your Highness with an heir!William Shakespeare -- Henry VIII
- She will have to have others, more remembering the young strong body from out whose travail even there shone something tranquil and unafraid.William Faulkner -- Light in August
- Though I couldn't claim to read the mind of a horse, I had the strange notion that this one was enjoying my travails.Nicholas Sparks -- Dear John
- All women, he thought, from the youngest on up, seemed fascinated by his travail and agony.Pat Frank -- Alas, Babylon
- For the first time all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived appeared on the surface.Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace
- But not for that dream I on this strange course, But on this travail look for greater birth.William Shakespeare -- Much Ado About Nothing
- On March 18 Tex Stanton, who had endured and witnessed so much travail, received his final wounds.James Bradley -- Flags of Our Fathers
- 35:16 And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.The Bible -- Genesis
- When I came to my cabin after trying to help Charley in his travail, Robbie was tying a trouble light to the iron frame of my sad bed.John Steinbeck -- Travels with Charley
- France seems travailing in the birth of freedom [wrote William Maclay].David McCullough -- John Adams
- Out of his travail he had climbed on stepping-stones of his dead self.Zane Grey -- The Call of the Canyon
- Suffered the Indignities and Travails of this World for 42 Years, 4 months, 9 Days, and went to Rest at Last February 12, 1884.William Faulkner -- Absalom, Absalom!
- And when he came to the verse, "A woman, when she is in travail, hath sorrow because her hour is come", he missed it out.D.H. Lawrence -- Sons and Lovers