Work. It's one of those short, versatile words in English that labours away without attracting much notice.

People go out to work, while others head to the gym for a workout – a term coined in the boxing ring, as pugilists practised moves before an actual bout. Performers know how to work a crowd, while diplomats are skilled at working things out when folks get all worked up.

The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, devotes more than 20 pages to the word – from physics (force overcoming resistance or producing molecular change) to fine arts (a composition, painting, sculpture or other form of expression), from theology (a good deed) to mathematics (solving a problem.)

For hundreds of years the insides of clocks have been known as "works," which may not seem too cuckoo because we're used to hearing it. But what about the froth you get at the top of fermenting alcohol that's being turned into vinegar? Yup. As far back as 1839 it was known in the industry as "work."

Some people like fries with their vinegar, and verbs with their nouns. In P.E.I., work down means to gradually decrease the temperature of potatoes in storage to keep them from spoiling, according to the 1988 Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English. And if we're going to feast on chips, there's no point leaving out the fish. The 1982 Dictionary of Newfoundland English points out that when the cod work well there are plenty around to be caught with ease. Even after the fish are hauled up, split, salted and placed in a pile, they still work ("undergo the curing process.")

The sea of slang seems almost bottomless. In Britain, criminals "work the rattle" (trains), while in New York thugs "work the hole" (subway.) In many countries, prostitutes "work the street," "work the door," or are just plain "working." And cops who try to catch law breakers often "have their work cut out for them" – an expression believed to have its roots in garment-making 400 years ago. Work is a real piece of work, so to speak.

ORIGINS

The word's curriculum vitae boasts more than a millennium of work experience. In Old English, weorc was the noun and wyrcan the verb. Both had ties to the Dutch and German term werk, which in turn shared an Indo-European stem that sprouted from Greek: ergon. All of this explains why roughly 50 years ago some scholars decided to label "the study of the relationship between people and their working environment" ergonomics, a broad discipline that looks at everything from efficiency to safety limitations.

Work used to have a popular helper to get the job done: wrought. It was challenged by the past tense and past participle worked as early as the 15th century, and over the years gradually lost ground. Some entrenched expressions refused to budge, however, including the Bible's "What hath God wrought?" In 1844, those four words became the first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse, a signal of dots and dashes that worked liked a charm.

Wrought still surfaces in a few places. For instance, people may become overwrought with emotion if a vandal damages their prized wrought iron railing. But as the 1996 New Fowler's Modern English Usage estimates, "not one person in a thousand would recognize the connection" today between wrought and work.

LONG, WIDE ROAD

The earliest written account of werce was recorded around 825 AD, and over the centuries a number of other spellings appeared, including weorc, werc, wark and worke.

Although virtually all of these were eventually replaced by work, a few of the old-timers have refused to retire completely. "Boulevard" came to English from French, for instance, but its roots are much older still. In German, it was bollwerk – originally thick fortification walls made out of tree trunks. The ramparts, also known as bulwarks, took a lot of effort to build well. They were literally bole (tree) wark (work).

Later, after battles had ended and the land along these defensive perimeters was turned into wide promenades, "boulevard" took on the new meaning of a friendly street often lined with trees – a perfect place for a leisurely stroll at the end of a hard day at the office, or wherever else you may work.

The path boulevard took is part of a labyrinth of etymology that is fascinating to explore. But you can quickly end up lost on a tangent, and might even wind up in Oklahoma, where the state motto is labor vincit omnia – Latin for "work conquers everything."

MAIN DEFINITIONS

As already mentioned, the meaning of work has taken on hundreds of different shades over the years. Most of these, however, are based on a few general categories:

• Mental or physical effort

• A means of earning income

• A specific task

• Something done or made

So you can work clay into the shape you want while listening to a work by Bach before or after heading to work. You can also order a hamburger with the works (everything), as well as accidentally gum up the works (a machine's gears.)

If you start reworking the word, adding syllables or constructing compound expressions, you can work wonders with your vocabulary as you work over the English language. And if purists don't like the results, you can probably find a way to work around the complaints.

WORK SHIFTS

Workday used to be called workyday and workaday, patterned after three-syllable words like holiday. Nowadays it's compressed, along with Sunday, which used to be sunnende. Some people's work weeks have also been shortened, while other's have been forced to start "moonlighting" – a 19th century term that originally meant illegal activity at night before being broadened in the 1950s to include the burden of a second job.

Our language chronicles social, political, economic and technological change in its own way. People have obviously been working since they had to find food or make shelter. It was called survival. And in the days of slavery, servants were also required to work just to stay alive.

By the 1780s, the term working class was being used to describe "the grade of society comprising those who are employed to work for wages in manual or industrial occupations." Much of their income, of course, was – and still is – spent on food and shelter, leaving some critics to question how far we've really come. The Canadian Dictionary of Business and Economics defines people with full-time jobs who can't claw themselves above the poverty line as the working poor.

Work-sharing appears to be a product of the Great Depression. The earliest reference cited by Oxford (1934) defines it as "a method of adjusting labour to labour requirements" – a roundabout way of saying let's turn one person's job into two part-time positions. Being out of work altogether is a problem that goes back much further than Shakespeare's use of the expression in Act I of Henry V (1599), or even before workless began performing its job in the 1400s.

Labour unrest in the 1920s gave us work to rule, while in the 1960s a growing appetite to hold business meetings during meals encouraged us to cook up the working lunch. Although the term workshop has been around since at least the 1580s, workstation didn't show up until the 20th century – a useful addition for those who wanted to put emphasis on an individual's spot in the assembly line. By the way, the earliest published description of a computer terminal as a "workstation" appeared in the fall of 1977.

The label women's work was first used in 1670. It was at the core of a proverb about how a lot of difficult and essential jobs around the house are "never at an end." Roughly 300 years later we began to acknowledge that (a) there is also rarely any pay for these hours of toil, and (b) the original term was shamefully sexist.

Work bee is a Canadian expression to describe a co-operative effort by volunteers, according to the 1973 Concise Dictionary of Canadianisms published by Gage. Repairing a barn or cleaning picnic grounds are examples. But it's worth noting that the word bee, itself, already had this meaning in the United States about 250 years ago – inspired by the insect's industry and social behaviour.

As with so much of English, the exact history of many of these terms remains fuzzy. Workfare is a perfect example. New York Times columnist William Safire takes credit for the word, which squashes "working for welfare" into two syllables. But workfare appeared in Harper's at least one year earlier, in 1968, and even then the magazine was quoting a politician. Safire's claim was reprinted in his 1988 book You Could Look It Up. He obviously didn't. Perhaps it was just too much work.

EVOLVING WORKFORCE

Occupations come and go, prompting words to enter and leave our everyday language. For instance, when's the last time you ran across an eggler (an egg dealer in the 1700s), a rattoner (a rat-catcher in the 14th century), or a tosher (scavengers who hunted for valuables in sewers in the days of Charles Dickens)?

In other cases, old titles still exist but the jobs themselves have changed. Take barbers, who used to be surgical assistants looking after everything from pulling teeth to bloodletting. As Jeffrey Kacirk points out in his 1997 book Forgotten English, surgery comes from chirurgery – a Latin word based on a Greek term that literally meant kheir (hand) ergon (work).

Today, a bad barber may be accused of butchering a cut, but there probably won't be any scalpels involved. (The chances of anyone being left in stitches by such crummy puns are equally remote.) By the way, the word "operate" sprang from the Latin verb for performing work: operari. So "surgeons busy operating" are actually "hand workers who have their hands full working."

WORKING TOWARDS A FINISH

Work has worked its way into many parts of our language and lives. The rich get their money to work for them. The bored come up with make-work projects. The self-employed set their own hours, but they still need to find workspace and cope with workloads.

Climbing the corporate ladder can be hard work, and it may not lead anywhere cushy. Even our bosses generally answer to somebody. Boss, by the way, came to English from Dutch. North Americans couldn't abide using the imperious term "master" for their supervisors, according to Morton Freeman's 1993 book Even-Steven and Fair and Square. But they decided that the same word didn't sound nearly as bad in Dutch (baas), and so boss was born.

Those without jobs are workless, although many work on the problem by checking the help-wanted ads. For more than a century, lazy people have been known euphemistically as work-shy. Those who are actually afraid of work get a fancier, Greek label: ergophobic, sometimes called ergasiophobic.

There may be good reason to fear work, especially if you're bilingual. In French the word is travail, which came from trepalium – medieval Latin for "instrument of torture." It was literally a three (tres) stake (palus) device that could pierce flesh. In English, travail still refers to painful effort or labour, including childbirth. The word travel has the same root (a Middle English variant of "travail"), which might not surprise weary workers who face long commutes.

Since 1968, people who can't stop themselves from putting in endless hours of extra duties have been called workaholics. Lexicographers consider the formation flawed, since the word that inspired it, alcoholics, describes an addiction to alcohol, not alco. But workaholic is immediately understood – part of a popular trend to brand various urges this way (consider shopaholic and chocoholic.) The term also slips off the tongue more easily than its Greek synonym, ergomaniac.

Artists produce works, which sometimes turn out to be masterpieces. And it's quite common to hear a major composition called an opus (plural opera) – the Latin noun for "work." Students are saddled with homework, there is always an enormous amount of housework to do, and during leisure hours many people still manage to work up a sweat.

Stable, loving relationships require a lot of work, but they can pay off. "Nice work if you can get it," as George and Ira Gershwin once said of amorous couples "holding hands at midnight." It's worth pointing out here that bed-work has nothing to do with this sort of pastime. Since Shakespeare's days, it has referred to a job that' s so easy it requires virtually no effort.

Finally, someone who actually loves work is called an "ergophile." But you don't need to pick a lofty Greek term to describe this condition. People who are blessed with jobs that they truly enjoy go by a much simpler name … lucky. For those travelling a different career path, it's travail all the way.