Wordie [wûrd • ē]
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19 wordies list
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first listed by:
thricedotted (1094 words)
appears in these lists:
Loaded Dice, by oroboros
cutting words, by fbharjo
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The sense "work, esp. hard work" is first recorded as dialectal: 1853 New Zealand, 1890 Gloucestershire, 1890 Melbourne, 1891 Sheffield. It's hard to tell how to Google this, but I'd imagine it's almost invariably in the locution 'hard graft' these days.
The sense "bribery, corruption" might be derived from this; it is first attested in 1865 and for a long time was U.S. and slang.