To make a determined effort, to work hard. This allusion to pushing a bogged-down cart dates from the early seventeenth century. Robert Burton used it in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “Like him in Aesop . . . he whipt his horses withal, and put his shoulder to the wheel.” Only in the eighteenth century was it extended to any kind of hard work, as in Madame d’Arblay’s diary entry (June 1792): “We must all put our shoulders to the wheel.”