1. Productive activity, esp. for the sake of economic gain.
2. The body of persons engaged in such activity; especially, those working for wages.
3. A body of people considered as a class (distinguished from management and capital).
4. Physical or mental work; especially, of a hard or fatiguing kind; toil.
5. A job or task done or to be done.
6. The physical effort and periodic uterine contractions during childbirth.
7. The interval from the onset of birth contractions to actual childbirth.
8. The process which, by the utilization of uterine musculature contractions as a force, results in the delivery of the products of conception of a pregnancy from the uterus and through the vaginal outlet.

Customerly, "birth labor" is divided into three stages:

1. From onset of purposeful uterine contractions until full dilation of the cervix.
2. From full cervical dilation until vaginal delivery of the fetus.
3. From delivery of the fetus through delivery of the placenta.

A four-letter word that is avoided by many people: work quotes.

Children are forced to work very early in their lives

• Guatemalan children shine shoes and make bricks, many starting as early as five or six years of age.
• They cut cane and mop floors; and at some factories exporting to the United States, they sew and sort and chop, often in conditions so onerous that they violate even Guatemala's very loose labor laws.
• Guatemala's young workers, most of them poor indigenous people, say they often feel that nobody cares about them, not their parents who send them off to the work force, not their stern bosses who treat them like adults, and not even the dysfunctional government in Guatemala City.
• Guatemalan work-places resemble grade schools, with adult supervisors standing over little laborers like the strictest of teachers.
• According to an independent study of the issue, an estimated one million Guatemalan children under the age of 18 are working.

One child worker's testimony

The child workers are people like Maria, 16, who lamented her four years in the labor force, but at the same time insisted that she not be fully identified so as not to endanger a job that is helping to support her parents and four brothers and sisters.

• "My father hits me and tells me I can't study," she said, tears running down her cheeks. "He stays home and drinks and I have to go to the factory."
• On Sundays, her only day off, she goes to special classes for young laborers offered by the Center for Study and Support for Local Development.
• Despite having worked at a factory since she was twelve and at home for years before that, Maria has now completed the equivalent of third grade.
• "I can be so tired, so exhausted, but I feel so good when I come home and read," she said, her tears stopping and her face lighting up.
• "It can be any book. I just like to see the words."

Labor and knowledge.

Motto of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana, USA.

Perseverance [Work] overcomes all difficulties.

Motto of Centenary College of Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana, USA; and the State of Oklahoma, USA.

The phrase/motto is a shortened form of Virgil's statement in his Georgics: Labor omnia vicit improbus, "Never-ending work conquered all things."

It is said that Virgil was describing the harshness of life following the Golden Age, when the earth had yielded its fruits without labor. Jupiter then decided to change everything, making life hard so mankind would learn and become independent.