laborais

Laborais is the second-person plural present indicative form of the Portuguese verb laborar, meaning to work or to labor. It appears in texts written in the European Portuguese tradition that use the archaic pronoun vós, and it is rarely used in modern everyday speech. In Brazilian Portuguese, the corresponding form for you all is vocês trabalham.

Origin and grammar: Laborar derives from Latin laborare. Like other -ar verbs, it follows a regular present-tense paradigm; thus the form laborais is used with the second-person plural pronoun vós. Because laborar is less common in modern Portuguese than trabalhar, laborais tends to appear mainly in older literature, liturgical contexts, or registers that preserve historic pronouns.

Usage: Today, laborais is typically encountered in religious texts, historical writings, or regional varieties that retain the vós form. In contemporary writing and speech, speakers usually employ vocês trabalham or, in formal contexts, forms that avoid the vós pronoun altogether. When illustrating the distinction, examples often contrast “Vós laborais” with the more common “Vocês trabalham.”

See also: Portuguese grammar; Vós; Portuguese verb conjugation; Latin roots of Romance languages.