Meaning & use
menial work
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Meaning
noununcountable
Work that is dull, repetitive and low in status, needing little skill or training and bringing little reward or respect.
Grammar: Not used with an or a plural: she did menial work, not a menial work.
Patterns
- do menial work
- be reduced to menial work
- menial work for someone
After he lost his license, he could only find menial work cleaning offices at night.
Many graduates complain that their first jobs involve nothing but menial work like filing and fetching coffee.
She refused to see menial work as shameful, since it paid for her sister's studies.
Common combinations
- do menial work
- He spent two summers doing menial work on a building site.
- reduced to menial work
- The former engineer was reduced to menial work after the factory closed.
- low-paid menial work
- Low-paid menial work is often the only option for new arrivals without paperwork.
- menial work like cleaning
- The internship was mostly menial work like cleaning and sorting boxes.
- look down on menial work
- Nobody in our family looks down on menial work if it is honest.
Synonyms and how they differ
- drudgery
- Drudgery stresses how tiring and boring the effort is, while menial work stresses that the job is low in skill and status.
- manual labor
- Manual labor simply means physical work done with the hands and carries no built-in judgment, whereas menial work is often disapproving.
- donkey work
- Donkey work is a British informal phrase for the hard, tedious part of a task, and it describes a task rather than a type of job.
- grunt work
- Grunt work is informal and refers to boring tasks inside a larger project, often given to the newest person.
Opposites
Word family
Commonly confused: menial work or manual work?
menial work vs manual work
Manual work means work done with the hands and body and is neutral, but menial work always suggests low status or boredom.
Practice
Which sentence uses menial work correctly?
Choose one answer.
Menial work is uncountable and describes dull, low-status tasks like sweeping. A surgeon's rare operation is skilled, and a menial work or menial works is ungrammatical.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “menial work”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.