Alternative spellings

• labour (Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada)

Noun

Singular labor

Plural countable and uncountable; plural labors

labor (countable and uncountable; plural labors)

1. Effort expended on a particular task; toil, work.
   • 1719, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

     ...so I set myself to enlarge my cave, and work farther into the earth; for it was a loose sandy rock, which yielded easily to the labour I bestowed on it...

2. (uncountable) Workers in general; the working class, the workforce; sometimes specifically the labor movement, organised labor.
3. The act of a mother giving birth.
4. The time period during which a mother gives birth.

Labour or labor may refer to:

• Work of any kind
• Wage labour, in which a worker sells their labour and the employer buys it
  • Employment
• Manual labour, physical work done by people

Other:

• Childbirth, especially from the start of uterine contractions to delivery
• Labour (economics), one of the three main factors of production
• Labour economics, the economic field, broadly conceived, encompassing study of Labour (economics)
• Labour Party, a political party in various countries
• Labour/Le Travail, an academic journal focusing on the Canadian labour movement.
• Josef Labor, a composer, pianist, organist, and teacher
• Labor, an obsolete unit of area

Labor is work of any kind

• The labor movement was the development of a collective organization of working people
• A labor union is an association of wage-earners meant to maintain or improve conditions of employment

Contents

• 1 Sourced
  • 1.1 Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 See also
• 4 External links

Sourced

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those who will.
  • Henry Ward Beecher, p. 368.

• Let parents who hate their offspring rear them to hate labor, and to inherit riches; and before long they will be stung by every vice, racked by its poison, and damned by its penalty.
  • Henry Ward Beecher, p. 438.

• Blessed is the man who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. Know thy work, and do it; and work at it like Hercules. One monster there is in the world, the idle man.
  • Thomas Carlyle, p. 367.

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Sun Mar 7 08:28:20 2010