From Middle English mollen (“to soften by wetting”), borrowed from Old French moillier with the same meaning, from Vulgar Latin *molliō, *molliare, from mollis (“soft”).
Meanings
(countable, uncountable) Hard work.
I finally decided, my heart was really in my singing rather than in the drab, hardy soul- searing toil and moil of a collier's existence. 1928, Harry Lauder, chapter VII, in Roamin' in the Gloamin',:
(countable, uncountable) Confusion, turmoil.
Croft no longer saw anything clearly; he could not have said at that moment where his hands ended and the machine gun began; he was lost in a vast moil of noise out of which individual screams and shouts etched in his mind for an instant. 1948, Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, Part I, Chapter 5:
(countable, uncountable) A spot; a defilement.
You'd suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun,
The moil of death upon them. 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh:
From Middle English mollen (“to soften by wetting”), borrowed from Old French moillier with the same meaning, from Vulgar Latin *molliō, *molliare, from mollis (“soft”).
Meanings
To toil, to work hard.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee. 1907, Robert W. Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, in The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses:
Why for sluggards cark and moil? 1849, Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke's Song:
Now he must moil and drudge for one he loathes. 1693, John Dryden, “Tenth Satire of Juvenal”, in Juvenal and Persius:
Moil not too much underground, for the hope of mines is very uncertain, and useth to make the planters lazy in other things.. 1625, Francis Bacon, Of Plantations:
(intransitive) To churn continually; to swirl.
A crowd of men and women moiled like nightmare figures in the smoke-green haze. 1952, Ralph Ellison, chapter 23, in Invisible Man:
Of unclear origin; possibly from French meule or Hebrew מוהל (mohel, “ritual circumciser”), referring to the foreskin-like shape of the unwanted rim.
Meanings
(countable, uncountable) The glass circling the tip of a blowpipe or punty, such as the residual glass after detaching a blown vessel, or the lower part of a gather.
(countable, qualifier:blow molding, uncountable) The excess material which adheres to the top, base, or rim of a glass object when it is cut or knocked off from a blowpipe or punty, or from the mold-filling process. Typically removed after annealing as part of the finishing process (e.g. scored and snapped off).
(countable, uncountable) The metallic oxide from a blowpipe which has adhered to a glass object.