drudgy vs gruelling

drudgy

adj
  • Suggestive of drudgery; being excessively hard or requiring excessive effort. 

noun
  • Drudgery; labour. 

gruelling

adj
  • So difficult or taxing as to make one exhausted; backbreaking. 

noun
  • A gruelling ordeal. 

  • A race in which the animal being raced finishes in a state of physical exhaustion. 

How often have the words drudgy and gruelling occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )