Factories

How to spell factories

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce factories

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does factories mean?

1. nounBuildings or sites where goods are manufactured, usually with machinery and a workforce.

Factories in a sentence

• The company runs three factories across the region.

• Older factories along the canal were converted into apartments.

Where does factories come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of 'factory', which arrived in English in the late 1500s from the Medieval Latin factoria, meaning a place where factors (agents or traders) conducted business; that sense is why early trading posts overseas were called factories. The root is the Latin verb facere, meaning 'to make or do', which also gives us 'manufacture', 'fact', and 'factor'. Over the 1600s and especially during the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s, the meaning shifted from a merchant's outpost to a building where goods are made by machinery. The plural drops the 'y' and adds '-ies', the standard pattern for nouns ending in a consonant plus 'y', which is the main thing to watch when writing it. The shared facere root is a useful memory hook: a factory is literally a place for making things.

How the word is built

• fact- (from Latin facere: to make or do)
• -or (agent/place)
• -y (place where; from -oria)
• -ies (plural)