# a Sisyphean task

idiom · CEFR C1

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/sisyphean-task
Updated: 2026-07-29

## Meaning

A task that is endless and futile, because it must be repeated forever without ever being finished.

## Examples

- Tidying up after the kids is a Sisyphean task.
- Clearing his inbox felt like a Sisyphean task, since a dozen new emails arrived for every one he answered.
- Moderating the platform became a Sisyphean task: every account the team removed was replaced overnight by two more, so the work simply rolled back down the hill each morning.

## Origin

Sisyphus was a king celebrated for his cunning, clever enough to cheat death itself not once but twice. When the god of the dead came to fetch him, Sisyphus tricked him and clapped him in chains, and for a while no one on earth could die at all. Dragged down to the underworld in the end, he talked his way back up to the living world on a lie and lived on for years more. The gods do not forgive being outwitted. When death claimed him for good, they devised a punishment shaped precisely to the shape of his crime. He had thought himself cleverer than they were; very well — they would set him a task with no end and no way out, for ever. They gave him a boulder and a hill. The sentence was simply this: roll the great stone to the summit. So he set his shoulder against it and heaved, straining and sweating, the rock grinding upward inch by inch through the whole long climb. But the stone was cursed. Each time Sisyphus neared the top, the boulder twisted from his grip and went crashing all the way down to the plain, and he had no choice but to trudge down after it and begin again. Up and down, up and down, through all eternity, nothing ever finished and nothing ever gained. A Sisyphean task is any labour cut to that pattern: endless, exhausting and futile, work that must be done over and over and can never, by its nature, be completed.

---

From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.