Industry

How to spell industry

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce industry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does industry mean?

1. nounA branch of economic activity concerned with producing goods or providing services on a large scale.
2. nounSteady effort, diligence, and hard work applied to a task.

Industry in a sentence

• The car industry employs thousands of skilled workers in the region.

• Her industry and attention to detail earned her a promotion.

• Tourism is the fastest growing industry along the coast.

• The report praised the team for its quiet industry over many months.

Where does industry come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin industria, meaning 'diligence' or 'purposeful activity', a noun built on the adjective industrius, 'hard-working' or 'busy'. That adjective is usually traced to an older form indu (an archaic version of in, 'within') joined to a root related to struere, 'to build or pile up', so the underlying picture is of energy directed and built up inside a person. English borrowed it through French in the fifteenth century, when it meant skill, cleverness, or steady hard work rather than factories. Only during the economic changes of the eighteenth century did 'industry' take on its now-dominant sense of organised manufacturing and trade, as in the Industrial Revolution. The older meaning still survives whenever we praise someone for their industry, and the spelling stays straightforward because the unstressed second syllable (in-DUS-try) rarely tempts writers into error.

How the word is built

• indu- (Latin indu-, an old form of in-: within)
• -stry (from struere: to build, pile up; via industria)