Forswinks

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Wears someone out by making them labor excessively until they are weary and spent
2. Tires a person or animal out through overwork, leaving them physically drained by hard toil
3. Exhausts oneself or another through prolonged, wearing labor in an archaic sense

Etymology: "Forswinks" is the third-person singular form of "forswink," a verb meaning to exhaust or tire oneself out through toil. The verb comes from Middle English "forswinken," built from the intensive prefix "for-" and "swink," an older English word for hard labour. Its prefix does the same work as in "forwander" or "forpine," intensifying the base sense until it means wearing oneself down completely. "Swink" itself is a shade of meaning that has largely vanished from everyday speech: it describes drudgery, the grinding effort of work rather than work in general. Because "forswink" survives mainly in older poetry and in reading of medieval texts, the word feels archaic, yet its structure is transparent: a prefix attached to a labour word, producing a verb that means to toil oneself to the point of collapse.

Synonyms: exhaust, weary, tire out