Overlabouren

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. To labour beyond what is reasonable or healthy, wearing oneself or someone else out through excessive toil
2. Archaic verb meaning to strain or exhaust by working too hard, or to burden a person with more toil than they can bear
3. To exert oneself past the point of sensible effort, or to overtax someone through relentless, excessive labour

Etymology: Overlabouren is a Middle English verb meaning to work too hard or to burden someone with too much labour. It is built from the prefix "over-", meaning excessively, and "labouren", which came into Middle English from Old French "labourer" and ultimately from Latin "laborare", meaning to toil or work hard. In Latin, "labor" carried the sense of hardship and strain as well as work, which is why the English family of words has always leaned toward effort and exhaustion. The prefix does the work here: Old English "ofer" gave Middle English "over-", and attaching it to a verb meant doing that action beyond what was reasonable. English formed many such verbs in this period, like "overeaten" and "overdrive", and most of them have since faded. "Overlabouren" has largely disappeared from modern use, though "overlabour" survives in dictionaries as a verb with the same sense. The earlier form is best understood as a Middle English coinage on familiar parts rather than a word with its own separate history.