Laboratory vs. Factory — What's the Difference?

A laboratory (UK: , US: ; colloquially lab) is a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific or technological research, experiments, and measurement may be performed. Laboratory services are provided in a variety of settings: physicians' offices, clinics, hospitals, and regional and national referral centers.

A factory, manufacturing plant or a production plant is an industrial site, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. They are a critical part of modern economic production, with the majority of the world's goods being created or processed within factories.

A room or building equipped for scientific experimentation or research.

A building or group of buildings in which goods are manufactured; a plant.

An academic period devoted to work or study in such a place.

See factory ship.

A place where drugs and chemicals are manufactured.

A business establishment for commercial agents or factors in a foreign country.

A place for practice, observation, or testing.

The source of prolific production

A room, building or institution equipped for scientific research, experimentation or analysis.

The position or state of being a factor.

A place where chemicals, drugs or microbes are prepared or manufactured.

A trading establishment, especially set up by merchants working in a foreign country.

The workroom of a chemist; also, a place devoted to experiments in any branch of natural science; as, a chemical, physical, or biological laboratory. Hence, by extension, a place where something is prepared, or some operation is performed; as, the liver is the laboratory of the bile.

A building or other place where manufacturing takes place.

Any place, activity or situation suggestive of a scientific laboratory{1}, especially in being conducive to learning new facts by experimentation or by systematic observation; as, the states serve as laboratories where different new policies may be tested prior to adoption throughout the country.

A police station.

A workplace for the conduct of scientific research

A device or process that produces or manufactures something.

A region resembling a laboratory inasmuch as it offers opportunities for observation and practice and experimentation;

A factory farm.

(programming) In a computer program or library, a function, method, etc. which creates an object.

Having come from the factory in the state it is currently in; original, stock.

A house or place where factors, or commercial agents, reside, to transact business for their employers.

The body of factors in any place; as, a chaplain to a British factory.

A building, or collection of buildings, appropriated to the manufacture of goods; the place where workmen are employed in fabricating goods, wares, or utensils; a manufactory; as, a cotton factory.

A plant consisting of buildings with facilities for manufacturing