travail

Travel comes from Old French travail, meaning 'hard work, torment, suffering.' Travail itself probably derives from Vulgar Latin *tripaliāre, meaning 'to torture with a tripalium' — a three-staked instrument of torture. The proposed etymological chain runs: tripalium (instrument of torture) → *tripaliāre (to torture) → travail (to suffer, to labor) → travel (to journey). The journey and the suffering were the same experience.

In medieval English, travel and travail were the same word. Geoffrey Chaucer uses 'travaille' for both hard labor and journeying. The meanings coexisted because the reality coexisted: a medieval journey was hard labor. Roads were terrible. Bandits were common. Weather was unavoidable. A trip from London to York took about four days on horseback and involved real physical suffering. To travel was to travail.

English split the word in two around the fifteenth century. Travail kept the meaning of hard labor and suffering. Travel kept the meaning of making a journey. French kept travail as its standard word for work — the French still go to travail every morning. English distinguished between the work and the journey, even though they had been the same thing for centuries.

The word's meaning continued to soften. By the nineteenth century, travel implied leisure — the Grand Tour, tourism, exploration for pleasure. By the twentieth century, travel was an aspiration. 'Travel the world.' 'Travel broadens the mind.' The word that once meant torture by a three-staked device now appears in luxury advertisements. The distance between a tripalium and a travel brochure is the distance between the medieval road and the jet age.