Manufacturer

How to spell manufacturer

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce manufacturer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does manufacturer mean?

1. nounA person or company that makes goods on a large scale, usually in a factory.

Manufacturer in a sentence

• The car manufacturer recalled thousands of vehicles over a faulty brake.

• She contacted the manufacturer directly to claim under the warranty.

Where does manufacturer come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to two Latin elements: manus, meaning 'hand', and facere, meaning 'to make' or 'to do', which combined to give the idea of something made by hand. The noun 'manufacture' arrived in English in the late 1500s by way of French, where it described the act of making goods, often skilled handwork at that early stage. The agent ending -er was then attached to name the person or company doing the making, and 'manufacturer' was in use by the early 1700s, just as workshops were giving way to factories. The original sense of 'made by hand' is now almost the opposite of how we use the word, since manufacturing today implies large-scale machinery. The same manus root sits inside 'manual', 'manuscript', and 'manage', while facere survives in 'factory', 'fact', and 'manufacture' itself; remembering that buried 'fact' helps fix the -fact- in the middle of the spelling.

How the word is built

• manu- (hand)
• fact (make, from facere 'to make')
• -ure (noun)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)