Etymologists are pretty certain that travail comes from trepalium, the Late Latin name of an instrument of torture. We don’t know exactly what a trepalium looked like, but the word’s history gives us an idea. Trepalium is derived from the Latin tripalis, which means having three stakes ( from tri-, meaning three, and palus, meaning stake) . From trepalium sprang the Anglo-French verb travailler, which originally meant to torment but eventually acquired the milder senses to trouble and to journey. The Anglo-French noun travail was borrowed into English in the 13th century, followed about a century later by travel, another descendant of travailler.