Definition of "moil"

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

1625, Francis Bacon, Of Plantations

Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes.

1693, John Dryden, “Tenth Satire of Juvenal”, in Juvenal and Persius

Why for sluggards cark and moil?

1849, Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke's Song

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 seeWas that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.

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

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

1952, Ralph Ellison, chapter 23, in Invisible Man

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.

1928, Harry Lauder, chapter VII, in Roamin' in the Gloamin'

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.

1948, Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, Part I, Chapter 5

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

1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh