task

noun

1. A piece of work done as part of one’s duties.

   “daily task”

   “monotonous task”

   “regular task”

   “parental task”

   “The employee refused to complete the assignment, arguing that it was not one of the tasks listed in her job description.”

2. Any piece of work done.

   “carry out a task”

   “complete a task”

   “Irregular bedtimes may disrupt healthy brain development in young children, according to a study of intelligence and sleeping habits. ¶ Going to bed at a different time each night affected girls more than boys, but both fared worse on mental tasks than children who had a set bedtime, researchers found.”

3. A single action undertaken by a given agent.

   “[T]here is a well-defined run in which the stages of Atalanta’s run are punctuated by finite rests, arguably showing the possibility of completing an infinite series of finite tasks in a finite time”

4. A difficult or tedious undertaking.

   “As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one.”

5. An objective.
6. A process or execution of a program.

   “The user killed the frozen task.”

7. (obsolete)A tax or charge.

   “Art thou the Collector of the Kings taske? […] Thou haſt thy taske money for all that be heere, […]”

8. (alt-of, alternative)Alternative form of taisch.

verb

1. (transitive)To assign a task to, or impose a task on.

   “On my first day in the office, I was tasked with sorting a pile of invoices.”

   “All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come / To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly, / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curl'd clouds, to thy strong bidding task / Ariel and all his quality.”

   “There task thy maids, and exercise the loom.”

   “By 1966 the building was considered so unsafe that the Royal Engineers were tasked with demolishing it.”

2. (transitive)To oppress with severe or excessive burdens; to tax

   “He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.”

3. (transitive)To charge, as with a fault.

   “Too impudent to task me with those errors.”