travail

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The Word of the Day for September 6 is:

travail   \truh-VAIL\   noun
     1 a : work especially of a painful or laborious nature : 
toil  b : a physical or mental exertion or piece of work : task, 
effort  *c : agony, torment
     2 : labor, parturition

Example sentence:
     "Increasingly, African-American women writers are telling 
of the specific travails that that history imposed upon their 
foremothers." (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, _Oxford Review_, February 
1992)

Did you know?
     Etymologists are pretty certain that "travail" comes 
from "trepalium," the Late Latin name of an instrument of 
torture. We don't know exactly what a "trepalium" looked like, 
but the word's history gives us an idea. "Trepalium" is derived 
from the Latin "tripalis," which means "having three stakes" 
(from "tri-," meaning "three," and "palus," meaning "stake").