drudgery

Etymology

From drudge (“person who works in a low servile job”) + -ery (suffix meaning ‘the art, craft, or practice of’ forming nouns).

noun

1. Exhausting, menial, and tedious work.
   Here he met with a Drudgerie almoſt invincible, and if we add the Task to the Time, it is enough to make a Man old. 1652, “A Short Advertisement to the Reader”, in Eugenius Philalethes [i.e., Thomas Vaughan], transl., The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of the R: C: Commonly, of the Rosie Cross.[…], London: […] J[ohn] M[acock] for Giles Calvert,[…], →OCLC, page 58
   A large part of duty-doing is drudgery. There is drudgery in every department of life's work–drudgery that is indispensable to success in that work. […] But there is such a thing as ennobling drudgery, as making and counting it an essential part of that which is noble and–in a sense–divine. 1889, H[enry] Clay Trumbull, “Making Drudgery Divine”, in Duty-knowing and Duty-doing, Philadelphia, Pa.: John D. Wattles, →OCLC, page 133
   I felt that I was really growing up—my thirteenth birthday lay just ahead—and classroom work suddenly took on a new aspect. It was no longer just one of the unavoidable drudgeries of boyhood: it was a time of preparation, and I felt obliged to consider what i was going to do with my life. 1972, Bruce Catton, “Interlude with Music”, in Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood (Great Lakes Books), Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, published 1987, pages 151–152
   Thus, mutually decided matters of contribution can be arranged within families to affect the ultimate benefits in family and society. Not all drudgery should be arbitrarily attributed to women, nor all social, political, and economic recognition be attributed to men. 1992, Amina Wadud, “Conclusion”, in Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, New York N.Y., Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, published 1999, page 104
   Engines that use fire have been sources of power and propulsion only in the past several centuries, and have succeeded in liberating humankind from drudgery. 2007, Kalyan Annamalai, Ishwar K. Puri, “Introduction and Review of Thermodynamics”, in Combustion Science and Engineering (CRC Series in Computational Mechanics and Applied Analysis), Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, section 1.1 (Introduction), page 1
   She does the same thing as any parent worth their salt, and gets rambunctious youngsters engaged in daily drudgeries by refashioning the quotidian as adventure. 12 December 2018, Charles Bramesco, “A Spoonful of Nostalgia Helps the Calculated Mary Poppins Returns Go Down”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 2019-05-24