Laboratory

How to spell laboratory

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce laboratory

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does laboratory mean?

1. nounA room or building equipped for scientific experiments, research, or testing.

Laboratory in a sentence

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

• Every chemistry student must wear goggles inside the laboratory.

Where does laboratory come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin labor, meaning 'work', 'toil', or 'exertion', the same root that gives us 'labour' and 'elaborate'. From the verb laborare, 'to work', Medieval Latin formed laboratorium, literally 'a place for working', which was used by alchemists and early scientists for the room where they carried out their experiments. English adopted it in the early seventeenth century, at first in that alchemical sense, and it gradually settled into its modern meaning of a room or building equipped for scientific research and analysis. The spelling preserves the full labor + atory structure, which matters because the unstressed middle vowels are easy to swallow in speech and then drop in writing. The popular short form 'lab' came much later, in the late nineteenth century, as casual shorthand.

How the word is built

• labor- (from Latin labor: work, toil)
• -atory (place for, suffix forming a noun of location)