Other forms: industries
An industry is all the companies making one kind of thing or providing one kind of service. The car industry, the film industry, the tourist industry.
As an uncountable noun, industry means manufacturing generally — heavy industry, industry and agriculture. The adjectives split neatly: industrial means to do with industry, and industrious means hard-working. That second sense preserves the word's older meaning, which is simply diligence: her industry was remarkable. Note industrial action, the British term for a strike, and the Industrial Revolution.
1nounindustryAll the companies making one kind of thing.
“The car industry is very important to the country's economy.”
2nounmanufacturingManufacturing in general.
“Industry moved out of the valley in about a decade.”
3nounhardHard work.
“Her industry was noticed long before her talent was.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
industry is a field of production.
Latin industria meant diligence and hard work, with no factories in it at all. English used it that way for three centuries before the eighteenth-century economy gave it the modern sense, leaving industrious behind as a fossil of the original.
itc-ola
indostruus — diligent, active
Latin
industria — diligence, activity, industry
Old French
industrie
Middle English
industry
English, today
industry
Built from
From Middle English industry, industrie, from Old French industrie, from Latin industria (“diligence, activity, industry”), from industrius (“diligent, active, zealous”), from itc-ola indostruus (“diligent, active”); origin unknown. Perhaps from indu (“in”) + ūst-, ūstr-, stem of ūrō (“burn, burn up, consume”), related to Old High German ūstrī (“industry”), Old English andūstrian (“to hate, detest”) literally “to be consumed with zeal”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA