travel [ME] Even today travel can be hard work, and travel comes from Middle English travail ‘painful or laborious effort’. The two forms were once interchangeable, and originated in an instrument of torture, called trepalium in Latin, that consisted of three stakes, the meaning of the Latin. Robert Louis Stevenson, himself a keen traveller, was the first to express the view that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, in 1881. The idea that travel broadens the mind appeared first in 1900.