Examples of “travail” in a Sentence

noun Hard, exhausting effort that involves suffering or hardship.

• And the British mandarin Left, like their contemporaries in the Foreign Office, had little time for the travails of the small countries between Germany and Russia, whom they had always regarded as something of a nuisance. — Tony Judt, Culture Wars (2005)
• Volkswagen’s travails are symbolic of the nation’s overall economic malaise and a political crisis that collapsed the government in December, paving the way for early elections Feb. 23. — Lenora Chu, How Volkswagen slid from German engineering icon to innovation laggard (2025)
• In the most egregious examples, these stories harness a particular woman’s travails without acknowledging the systems and forces that contributed to her treatment and how these systems persist in our own time. — Alexis Soloski, Why the Sudden Urge to Reconsider Famous Women? (2022)