moil

• Homophone: mohel
• Rhymes: -ɔɪl

• moile, moyle

From Middle English mollen (“to soften by wetting”), borrowed from Old French moillier with the same meaning, from Vulgar Latin *molliō, *molliare, from mollis (“soft”).

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

1. To toil, to work hard.
   • 1625, Francis Bacon, "Of Plantations":

     Moil not too much underground, for the hope of mines is very uncertain, and useth to make the planters lazy in other things..

   • 1693, John Dryden, Juvenal and Persius, "Tenth Satire of Juvenal":

     Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes.

   • 1849, Charles Kingsley, "Alton Locke's Song":

     Why for sluggards cark and moil?

   • 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. (intransitive) To churn continually; to swirl.
   • 1952, Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Chapter 23:

     A crowd of men and women moiled like nightmare figures in the smoke-green haze.

3. (Britain, transitive) To defile or dirty.

moil (countable and uncountable, plural moils)

1. Hard work.
   • 1928, Harry Lauder, Roamin' in the Gloamin', Chapter VII:

     I finally decided, my heart was really in my singing rather than in the drab, hardy soul- searing toil and moil of a collier's existence.

2. Confusion, turmoil.
   • 1948, Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, Part I, Chapter 5:

     Croft no longer saw anything clearly; he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine gun began; he was lost in a vast moil of noise out of which individual screams and shouts etched in his mind for an instant.

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.

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

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

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.

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

• gather
• mold seam
• pontil mark

• Milo, limo, milo

From Proto-Tai *ʰmwɯjᴬ (“bear”). Cognate with Thai หมี (mǐi), Northern Thai ᩉ᩠ᨾᩦ, Lao ໝີ (mī), Lü ᦖᦲ (ṁii), Tai Dam ꪢꪲ, Shan မီ (mǐi), Ahom 𑜉𑜣 (mii), Zhuang mui. Compare Old Chinese 羋 (OC *meʔ).

moil

1. bear (animal)

• duezmoil

moil m

1. Genitive of mol.