a building or group of buildings where people and machines make goods, usually in large quantities
The new car factory opened near the river last month.
During our school trip, we watched workers wrap chocolate bars inside the old brick factory.
✦ late 16th century: from French factorerie, based on Latin factor ‘doer, maker’; originally denoting an establishment for factors (merchants) engaged in trade, later evolving to mean a place where goods are manufactured.
in computing, a function, method, or class that creates and returns new objects of a particular type
The widget factory generates buttons with the correct color and size for our app.
Using a factory prevents us from exposing complex constructor logic to other modules.
✦ Borrowed from the general sense ‘place where something is produced’; adopted by programmers in the 1980s to describe code that ‘manufactures’ software objects.
