Idiom
grunt work
Meaning
Work (especially that which is heavy, repetitive or mindless) that is considered undesirable and therefore delegated to underlings.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I hate doing the grunt work at the office.”
“New employees usually handle the grunt work in the kitchen.”
“You do the grunt work while I talk to the customers.”
“The intern spent the entire afternoon doing grunt work like filing papers and organizing old files.”
“Before we can start the creative part of the project, we need to finish the grunt work of cleaning the data.”
“He spent his first week at the construction site doing the grunt work of carrying heavy bricks.”
“The lead researcher spent months designing the study, but she hired three students to handle the grunt work of labeling thousands of photos for the experiment.”
“While the senior partners focused on high-level strategy, the junior associates were left to handle the tedious grunt work required to prepare the case for trial.”
Examples
simple
“I hate doing the grunt work at the office.”
“New employees usually handle the grunt work in the kitchen.”
“You do the grunt work while I talk to the customers.”
contextual
“The intern spent the entire afternoon doing grunt work like filing papers and organizing old files.”
“Before we can start the creative part of the project, we need to finish the grunt work of cleaning the data.”
“He spent his first week at the construction site doing the grunt work of carrying heavy bricks.”
“The lead researcher spent months designing the study, but she hired three students to handle the grunt work of labeling thousands of photos for the experiment.”
complex
“While the senior partners focused on high-level strategy, the junior associates were left to handle the tedious grunt work required to prepare the case for trial.”
Origin
Derived from the verb grunt, which imitates the short, guttural sound of physical exertion. The compound appears in the mid-20th century to designate labour that is repetitive, menial, and perhaps best suited to those capable of making such noises.
Key words
Related idioms
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