Ranked by relevance and common usage.
Keep "laboured" when the sentence already sounds natural, when a synonym would add unintended emphasis, or when readers need the most familiar wording. A synonym should clarify or sharpen the message, not simply make the sentence look more varied.
If two options seem close, choose the one that best matches the audience and purpose of the sentence.
Choose a synonym only if it keeps the core idea of "laboured" intact in the sentence you are editing.
Check whether the replacement sounds more formal, casual, emotional, technical, or forceful than the original word.
Read the full sentence after the swap. Keep the synonym only when the sentence becomes clearer or more precise.
Review note: Synonym lists are ranked with lexical data and reviewed for practical writing value. Use the comparison notes, sentence evidence, and source labels together; a high-ranking synonym can still be wrong when the audience, register, or grammar changes.
After choosing a replacement for "laboured", read the sentence once for meaning and once for rhythm. The best synonym should feel natural in the full sentence, not only accurate in a word list.
If the synonym makes the sentence slower, vaguer, or more dramatic than intended, keep "laboured" or choose a simpler alternative from the closest-match group.
OpenGloss and ConceptNet supply richer edges like generalizations, collocations, and derivations.
10 total sentences available.
The slogan "Arbeit macht frei" at the gates of the Nazi concentration camps was entirely cynical. The prisoners who believed the deceitful promise that work would set them free had no real chance of freedom, regardless of how much they laboured. Many of them were worked to death; many more were deliberately exterminated.
Source: tatoeba (5315043)
The dog's laboured breathing and glazing eye showed that it was not far from its end. Indeed, its snow-white muzzle proclaimed that it had already exceeded the usual term of canine existence.
Source: tatoeba (6310151)
He laboured to restrain his desire to speak.
Source: tatoeba (7752702)
Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. While he himself laboured under the weight of his own body, these giants would be easily striding. He would consider them very sturdy, often thick-set, folk, but he would be compelled to allow them grace of movement and even beauty of proportion. The longer he stayed with them the more beauty he would see in them, and the less complacently would he regard his own type. Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered with fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display brown, yellow or ruddy skin, and yet others a translucent ash-green, warmed by the under-flowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many.
Source: tatoeba (8855572)
Showing 4 of 10 available sentences.
Closest matches include arduous, contrived, elaborate, exert, forced.
Compare the replacement against real sentence context. This entry includes sample sentences so you can check tone, grammar, and meaning before swapping words.