Swink
name, noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Toil, work, drudgery. archaic, countable, uncountable
"Dead on this homecoming cue Jack came home, his hands sheerfree of salesman’s swink, ready for Enderby."
- 1 To labour, to work hard archaic, intransitive
"Honour, estate, and all this worldes good, / For which men swinck and sweat incessantly"
- 2 To cause to toil or drudge; to tire or exhaust with labor. archaic, transitive
"And the swinked hedger at his supper sat."
- 1 A surname. countable, uncountable
- 2 A town in Otero County, Colorado, United States, named after George W. Swink. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"Dead on this homecoming cue Jack came home, his hands sheerfree of salesman’s swink, ready for Enderby."
Etymology
From Middle English swink, from Old English swinc (“toil, work, effort; hardship; the produce of labour”).
From Middle English swynken, from Old English swincan (“to labour, work”), from Proto-Germanic *swinkaną (“to swing, bend”). Cognate with Old Norse svinka (“to work”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.