English

Alternative forms

• moile, moyle

Verb

moil ‎(third-person singular simple present moils, present participle moiling, simple past and past participle moiled)

1. To toil, to work hard.
   • Francis Bacon

     Moil not too much under ground.

   • Dryden

     Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes.

   • 1907, Robert W. Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, in The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses:

     There are strange things done in the midnight sun
           By the men who moil for gold;
     The Arctic trails have their secret tales
           That would make your blood run cold;
     The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
           But the queerest they ever did see
     Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
           I cremated Sam McGee.

2. To churn continually.
3. (Britain, transitive) To defile or dirty.

Noun

moil ‎(countable and uncountable, plural moils)

1. Hard work.
2. Confusion, turmoil.
3. A spot; a defilement.
   • 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh:

     You'd suppose
     A finished generation, dead of plague,
     Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
     The moil of death upon them.

Synonyms

• (hard work): labour, labor; toil; work

Translations

Etymology 2

From Hebrew 'mohel', מוהל (ritual circumciser), referring to the foreskin-like shape of the unwanted rim.

Noun

moil ‎(plural moils)

1. (glassblowing) The glass circling the tip of a blowpipe or punty, such as the residual glass after detaching a blown vessel, or the lower part of a gather.
2. (glassblowing, blow molding) The excess material which adheres to the top, base, or rim of a glass object when it is cut or knocked off from a blowpipe or punty, or from the mold-filling process. Typically removed after annealing as part of the finishing process (e.g. scored and snapped off).
3. (glassblowing) The metallic oxide from a blowpipe which has adhered to a glass object.

Synonyms

• (excess glass): overblow (blow molding), scrap

See also

• gather
• mold seam
• pontil mark

Anagrams

• limo, Milo, milo

Scottish Gaelic

Noun

moil m

1. Genitive of mol.