swink

• IPA^(key): /swɪŋk/

• Audio (Southern England)

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• Rhymes: -ɪŋk

From Middle English swink, from Old English swinc (“toil, work, effort; hardship; the produce of labour”).

swink (countable and uncountable, plural swinks)

1. (archaic) toil, work, drudgery
   • 1963, Anthony Burgess, Inside Mr. Enderby:

     Dead on this homecoming cue Jack came home, his hands sheerfree of salesman’s swink, ready for Enderby.

From Middle English swinken, from Old English swincan (“to labour, work at, strive, struggle; be in trouble; languish”), from Proto-Germanic *swinkaną (“to swing, bend”), from Proto-Indo-European *sweng-, *swenk- (“to bend, swing, swivel”). Cognate with Old Norse svinka (“to work”). Related to swing.

swink (third-person singular simple present swinks, present participle swinking, simple past swank or swonk or swinkt or swinked, past participle swunk or swunken or swonken or swinkt or swinked)

1. (archaic, intransitive) to labour, to work hard
   • c. 1370–1390, [William Langland], “(please specify the passus number)”, in The Vision of Pierce Plowman [...], London: […] Roberte Crowley, […], published 1550, →OCLC:

     Heremites on an heep · with hoked staues,
     Wenten to Walsyngham · and here wenches after;
     Grete lobyes and longe · that loth were to swynke,
     Clotheden hem in copis · to be knowen fram othere;
     And shopen hem heremites · here ese to haue.

     (please add an English translation of this quote)

   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 8:

     Honour, estate, and all this worldes good, / For which men swinck and sweat incessantly

   • 1922 February, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC:

     And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously.

2. (archaic, transitive) To cause to toil or drudge; to tire or exhaust with labor.
   • 1634 October 9 (first performance), [John Milton], H[enry] Lawes, editor, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: […] [Comus], London: […] [Augustine Matthews] for Hvmphrey Robinson, […], published 1637, →OCLC; reprinted as Comus: […] (Dodd, Mead & Company’s Facsimile Reprints of Rare Books; Literature Series; no. I), New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1903, →OCLC:

     And the swinked hedger at his supper sat.

• beswink
• forswink
• swinker

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• Winks, winks