Labor-intensive

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Requiring a great deal of work, especially physical and manual effort versus capital. US

    "Picking beans is a very labor-intensive activity, there's no machine made that can do it."

Adjective
  1. 1
    requiring a large expenditure of labor but not much capital wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
labour-intensivework-intensiveworky

Example

More examples

"As economy develops, labor-intensive industries give way to capital-intensive industries."

Etymology

From labor + intensive. Compare work-intensive.

Related phrases

labor-intensiveness

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.