Factory

How to spell factory

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce factory

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does factory mean?

1. nounA building or set of buildings where goods are manufactured, usually with machinery.

Factory in a sentence

• The car factory runs three shifts a day.

• Workers at the factory assemble engines on a long production line.

Where does factory come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin factorium, a place of making, which was built on facere, meaning 'to make' or 'to do', through the agent noun factor, 'a doer' or 'maker'. It reached English in the late 1500s, partly by way of the Portuguese feitoria and the French factorerie, where it first described a trading post staffed by 'factors', the agents who conducted business abroad. By the 1600s the sense had shifted toward a building where goods were manufactured, and the industrial sense we use today took firm hold during the 1700s. The same facere root is hidden inside a whole family of everyday words such as 'manufacture', 'factor' and 'fact', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the visible 'fact' before the ending. Because the unstressed middle is spelled '-tory', writers sometimes drop the central vowel sound, but it follows the steady pattern of 'directory' and 'territory'.

How the word is built

• fact (from facere: to make/do)
• -ory (place where something happens)