Lab

How to spell lab

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce lab

What does lab mean?

1. nounA room or building equipped for scientific experiments, research, or testing.
2. nounA Labrador retriever, a popular breed of dog (informal).

Lab in a sentence

• The blood samples were sent to the lab for analysis.

• Their golden lab fetched the ball from the pond.

• She spent the afternoon running experiments in the chemistry lab.

• The family adopted a black lab from the shelter.

Where does lab come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a casual shortening of laboratory, a word that traces back to the Latin laboratorium, meaning 'a place for working', built on labor, the Latin noun for 'work', 'toil', or 'effort'. Laboratory entered English in the early 1600s to describe a room set aside for chemical or scientific experiments, and the snappy clipped form lab took hold in everyday speech during the nineteenth century as science became part of ordinary education and employment. The same labor root underlies familiar relatives such as 'labour', 'elaborate', and 'collaborate', all carrying the sense of effort or working together. The spelling stays reassuringly simple because it is just the first three letters of the longer word, with no silent letters or doubled consonants to trip anyone up.

How the word is built

• clipped form of laboratory; lab- (from labor: to work) shortened in casual use