MEANING
Requiring a large amount of human work, especially compared with machinery or other resources.
Use it for
explaining why a research method requires many working hours; comparing production that depends heavily on workers with mechanized production; identifying human-work requirements as a practical constraintIdentifies a demand for human work rather than assuming that a process is costly, wasteful, or technically unsophisticated. Academic functions: Significance / Scope, Research / Methodology, Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- labor-intensive industry
- labor-intensive production
- labor-intensive research
On the page
The economist distinguishes labor-intensive production from production that relies mainly on expensive equipment.
Manual annotation makes the research labor-intensive, but that fact alone does not show that the method is inefficient.
Word forms
- Base
- labor-intensive
Usage notes
Hyphenated adjective: labor-intensive industry, labor-intensive research. British spelling: labour-intensive; one canonical entry only. More or less labor-intensive is natural. Register: technical. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
Keep a thought for later. Sign in to save privately.