Other forms: factories
A factory is a large building where goods are made, usually by machines and in quantity. A car factory, factory workers, the factory closed in 1998.
The word carries a specific industrial picture — machines, shifts, a production line — which is why a workshop and a factory are different in scale and organisation rather than in purpose. It is used attributively in a set of common compounds: factory floor, factory settings, factory farming, and factory-made. Note that factory reset is now among the commonest uses of the word in ordinary life, and it means returning a device to how it left the factory.
1nounfactoryA large building where goods are made by machine.
“The factory employed four hundred people at its peak.”
2adjectivebelongingBelonging to or set at the factory.
“A factory reset will wipe everything on it.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
factory is a building where things are made.
Also accepted in games: plant
The word comes from Latin facere, to make, by way of factorium, a place of making. Its immediate ancestor in English was a factory in the trading sense — an overseas station where a factor, an agent, did business — and the manufacturing sense grew over it in the eighteenth century.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
la-cla
fact-
English, today
factory
Built from
Probably from factor + -y, although in Q83405 apparently influenced strongly by association with la-cla fact-, the past participial stem of faciō (“to make”); compare manufactory and Latin factōrium (“an oil press”). In trading establishment, originally after Portuguese feitoria. In invoice, probably after obsolete Dutch facture (“bill”); see facture. Compare Dutch factorij, Middle French factorie, Spanish factoría.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA