Reconstruction:Latin/tripaliare

From tripālium (“torture device”) +‎ -āre (verb-forming suffix).

• IPA^(key): /trebaʎˈʎaːr/

*tripāliāre (Proto-Western-Romance)

1. (transitive) martyrize, torture
2. (reflexive) torment oneself, suffer

   (by extension) exert oneself, toil

Became the generic word for "work" in much of Romance (rivalling the reflexes of labōrāre and operārī), a sense that appears to have developed relatively late, given that it is not found in the earliest Romance texts, and then presumably spread around via semantic borrowing.

Several descendants reflect the first vowel as /a/, perhaps simply due to assimilation to the stressed vowel of the following syllable.

• North Italian: (some or all possibly from Old French)
  • Emilian: travajâ
  • Ligurian: travagiâ
  • Piedmontese: travajé
  • Venetian: travajar
• Gallo-Romance:
  • Old Catalan: treballar (see there for further descendants)
  • Franco-Provençal: travalyér
  • Old French: travailler (see there for further descendants)
  • Old Gascon: tribalhar, trebalhar
    • Gascon: tribalhar
  • Old Occitan: trebalhar
    • Occitan: trabalhar, trebalhar
• Ibero-Romance:
  • Aragonese: treballar, triballar, traballar, troballar
  • Asturian: trabayar, trabachar
  • Old Galician-Portuguese: traballar
    • Galician: traballar
    • Portuguese: trabalhar
  • Spanish: trabajar

• Joan Coromines, José A. Pascual (1983) “trabajar”, in Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispánico (in Spanish), volumes V (Ri–X), Madrid: Gredos, →ISBN, page 571
• “treballar” in Diccionari català-valencià-balear, Antoni Maria Alcover and Francesc de Borja Moll, 1962.
• Walther von Wartburg (1928–2002) “*trĭpaliare”, in Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (in German), volumes 13: To–Tyrus, page 291