Swunk

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Worked hard and wearily at a task, toiling until exhausted, as in an old form of the verb meaning to labour
2. Laboured strenuously over a burdensome job, a dated past form describing exhausting physical or mental effort
3. Toiled with great exertion, an archaic past tense describing someone who strained and laboured through hard work

Etymology: "Swunk" is the past participle of "swink," a verb meaning to toil or labour, and it has all but vanished from everyday English. The surprising part is the root: the Proto-Germanic ancestor, *swinkaną, meant "to swing" or "to bend," so the idea of hard, bending labour grew out of a physical motion. Old English "swincan" carried the sense of labouring, and its noun cousin "swinc" covered both the toil itself and the produce that toil yielded. Old Norse had a close relative, "svinka," meaning "to work," which shows the verb was shared across the North Germanic and West Germanic branches. Middle English then kept the verb alive as "swynken," and the form "swink" became the standard spelling that writers used for centuries.

Synonyms: toiled, laboured, laboured

Antonyms: rested