Job

The etymology of job is uncertain, but it likely entered English in the mid-sixteenth century, possibly related to the Middle English gobbe, meaning a lump or mouthful. The earliest documented uses describe a specific, bounded piece of work: a cartload, a piece of business, an individual task performed for a set payment. A job had edges. It began, it was completed, and it ended. The word described work, not a worker.

Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, job retained its sense of a discrete task. Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary of the English Language defined a job as "a low mean lucrative busy affair" and "petty, piddling work," suggesting that the word carried connotations of small, transactional labor rather than meaningful occupation. To do a job was to perform a task, not to assume a role.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the word. As factories organized labor into permanent positions with fixed hours and recurring duties, a job ceased to describe a task and began to describe a relationship between a worker and an employer. By the nineteenth century, to have a job meant to occupy a position, and to lose a job meant to lose that position, with all the economic and social consequences that followed. The task had become a status.

By the twentieth century, job had absorbed the weight of identity. Job titles appeared on forms, business cards, and introductions. The question "What do you do?" expected a job title as the answer. The word that once described a lump of work had become the primary way millions of people described who they were.