From Middle English swynken, from Old English swincan (“to labour, work”), from Proto-Germanic *swinkaną (“to swing, bend”). Cognate with Old Norse svinka (“to work”).
Meanings
(archaic, intransitive) To labour, to work hard
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. 1922 February 2, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC:
Honour, estate, and all this worldes good, / For which men swinck and sweat incessantly 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 8:
(archaic, transitive) To cause to toil or drudge; to tire or exhaust with labor.
And the swinked hedger at his supper sat. 1634 October 9 (first performance; Gregorian calendar), [John Milton], edited by H[enry] Lawes, 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:
There was no internal graphite coating; instead a metal shield was used to collect the beam current the swinked electrons which in their prime had caused the screen to fluoresce. 1985, Rodney Dale, The Sinclair Story, page 65: