laboratory

A laboratory is the room where science actually gets done — benches, sinks, glassware, a fume cupboard humming in the corner. It is where blood samples are tested, where a school class heats copper sulphate over a burner, where a new battery gets taken apart.

Almost everyone says lab in speech. Laboratory is the full form you meet in writing and on doors: laboratory conditions, a laboratory report, a laboratory technician. The stress moves across the Atlantic — British la-BOR-a-tree, American LAB-ra-tor-ee — so the two sound like different words. It stretches past science as well: a city can be a laboratory for new ideas, meaning a place where they get tried out before anyone knows whether they work. And a lab rat is a bored office worker as readily as an animal in a cage.