toil: English has two words toil, one of them now used only in the plural. Toil ‘work’ comes via Anglo-Norman toiler ‘stir, agitate, wrangle’ from Latin tudiculāre ‘stir around’. This was derived from tudicula ‘mill for crushing olives’, a diminutive form of tudes ‘hammer’, which went back to the prehistoric base *tud- ‘hit’, source also of Latin tundere ‘beat, crush’, which gave English abstruse, protrude, etc. Toils ‘entanglements’ represents a plural use of the now archaic toil ‘net’ [16].
This denoted etymologically ‘something woven’: it came via Old French toile from Latin tēla, a contraction of an earlier *texlā, which was derived from the base *tex- ‘weave’ (source of English text, textile, etc). Toilet [16] was borrowed from French toilette, a diminutive form of toile. It originally meant ‘cloth cover’, but it gradually evolved via ‘cloth cover for a dressing table’ to ‘the act of dressing and grooming oneself’.
The sense ‘lavatory’ emerged in mid 19th-century America, from the now obsolete ‘dressing room (with lavatory attached)’, inspired no doubt by the same delicacy that produced American English bathroom ‘lavatory’. Another member of the same word-family is tiller [15], which came via Anglo-Norman telier ‘weaver’s beam’ from medieval Latin tēlārium, a derivative of tēla. => abstruse, protrude; technical, text, textile, texture, tiller, tissue, toilet
toil (v.)
early 14c., toilen, "pull at, tug," from Anglo-French toiller, Old French toellier "pull or drag about" (see toil (n.1)). Intransitive meaning "struggle, work hard, labor for considerable time" is from late 14c., perhaps by influence of till (v.). Related: Toiled; toiling.
toil (n.1)
"hard work," c. 1300, originally "turmoil, contention, dispute," from Anglo-French toil (13c.), from toiler "agitate, stir up, entangle, writhe about," from Old French toeillier "drag about, make dirty" (12c.), usually said to be from Latin tudiculare "crush with a small hammer," from tudicula "mill for crushing olives, instrument for crushing," from Latin tudes "hammer," from PIE *tud-, variant of *(s)teu- "to push, stroke, knock, beat" (see obtuse). Sense of "hard work, labor" (1590s) is from the related verb (see toil (v.)).
toil (n.2)
"net, snare," 1520s, from Middle French toile "hunting net, cloth, web" (compare toile d'araignée "cobweb"), from Old French toile "cloth" (11c.), from Latin tela "web, net, warp of a fabric," from PIE *teks- "to weave" (see texture (n.)). Now used largely in plural (as in caught in the toils of the law).
