slog

noun

1. (Australia, British, Canada, countable, uncountable)A long, tedious walk or march.
2. (Australia, British, Canada, broadly, countable, uncountable)A hard, persistent effort, session of work, or period.

   “It is as if Mr. Faulks had bled his own prose white, draining it of emotion in order to capture the endless enervating slog of war.”

   “England's experimental line-up will have realised early on that this would be a long, hard slog against the multi-talented Brazilians with great strength in their starting line-up and on the bench.”

   “There, despite the long slog of the pandemic and all the distracting dramas at headquarters, the schools themselves have mostly kept it together.”

   “Alsup wrote that Anthropic preferred to “steal” books to “avoid ‘legal/practice/business slog,’ as cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei put it.””

3. (countable)A book or other media that is difficult to get through due to dullness, density, or lack of narrative momentum.
4. (countable)An aggressive shot played with little skill.

verb

1. (intransitive)To walk slowly or doggedly, encountering resistance.

   “The leading engine was one of the Class Y6 2-8-8-2 compound articulateds, [...] The stack noise of one of these great brutes slogging up a grade was quite unforgettable.”

   “2014, Paul Salopek, Blessed. Cursed. Claimed., National Geographic (December 2014)https://web.archive.org/web/20150212214621/http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/12/pilgrim-roads/salopek-text A miraculous desert rain. We slog, dripping, into As Safi, Jordan. We drive the sodden mules through wet streets. To the town’s only landmark. To the “Museum at the Lowest Place on Earth.””

2. (broadly, intransitive)To work slowly and deliberately at a tedious task.
3. To strike something with a heavy blow, especially a ball with a bat.

   “It was like being slogged by a heavyweight boxer.”