Spelling.School · How to spell

How to spell labour

What it means: Hard physical work.

In a sentence: The ants work together to do their daily labour. ▶

The part people get wrong

Often misspelled as labor or laber.

Also spelled: labor (accepted as correct).

Same family: labourer, labouring, labourers, labour-intensive, labour union. If you can spell one, the shared part carries to the others.

Where it comes from: “Labour” comes from Latin *labor* meaning “work, toil, hardship.” In British and many Commonwealth varieties of English, the -our spelling is kept, while American English simplifies it to “labor,” a change popularized in the 19th century to create more phonetic spellings.

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Words like this

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