Jobs

The term ‘job‘ can mean 1. A full or part-time position of paid employment. 2. A piece of work, usually at a specific price. 3. A specific task people do as part of the routine of their occupation. 4. A duty or responsibility. 5. A project, as in ‘The airport job took twelve months to complete.’ 5. The performance or execution of a task, as in “She did an excellent job.”

 

Etymology of ‘job’ According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ‘job’, with the meaning ‘piece of work, something to be done,’ emerged in the English language in Britain in the 1620s, from the phrase Jobbe of Worke (1550s), meaning ‘task, piece of work’. Some etymologists suggest that it was a variant of Gobbe, which meant ‘mass, lump’, via the sense of ‘a cart-load’. It was not until the 1650s that the meaning widened to include ‘work people do for pay’. According to literary records, people first used the term with the meaning ‘a paid, permanent position of employment’ in 1858. From 1795, printers used the word as a slang for ‘piece of work of miscellaneous class’ (handbills, posters, etc.).