Emily Dickinson Lexicon

UN-DER-TAK'ING, n.

Any business, work or project which a person engages in, or attempts to perform; an enterprise. The canal, or the making of the canal, from the Hudson to lake Erie, a distance of almost four hundred miles, was the greatest undertaking of the kind in modern times. The attempt to find a navigable passage to the Pacific round North America, is a hazardous undertaking, and probably useless to navigation.