donkey work
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Hard, tedious, and often menial work
Literally: work done by a donkey
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
The first is that the direction of research within a department is under the control of the supervisors in that Department, for whom the Ph D student does the donkey work.
But as well as sharing in the donkey work, Platt's goals have become a vital part of England's armoury and before last week's 4–0 win over Turkey he scored his country's previous five goals.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “donkey work” mean?
Hard, tedious, and often menial work Literally: work done by a donkey
Is “donkey work” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.