industry

1. (uncountable) The tendency to work persistently.Examples: "Over the years, their industry and business sense made them wealthy."; "The ant has made himself illustrious / Through constant industry industrious. / So what? / Would you be calm and placid / If you were full of formic acid?"; "The line ends at Narvik. Eight years ago the whole town was in ruins, but the industry of the Norwegian people has rebuilt it entirely."Synonyms: industriousness, diligence, hardworkingness, diligence, industriousness, applicationuncountable

2. (countable, business, economics) Businesses of the same type, considered as a whole. Trade.Examples: "The software and tourism industries continue to grow, while the steel industry remains troubled."; "The steel industry has long used blast furnaces to smelt iron."; "Long before popular music evolved its many genres and subgenres, the industry was driven by a simple one-size-fits-all philosophy uncomplicated by impassioned debates over the origins of trip hop or the difference between deatchore and screamo."Synonyms: sector, fieldcountable

3. (uncountable, economics) Businesses that produce goods as opposed to services.Examples: "But through the oligopoly, charcoal fuel proliferated throughout London's trades and industries. By the 1200s, brewers and bakers, tilemakers, glassblowers, pottery producers, and a range of other craftsmen all became hour-to-hour consumers of charcoal."uncountable

4. (in the singular, economics) The sector of the economy consisting of large-scale enterprises.Examples: "There used to be a lot of industry around here, but now the economy depends on tourism."; "[Rural solar plant] schemes are of little help to industry or other heavy users of electricity. Nor is solar power yet as cheap as the grid. For all that, the rapid arrival of electric light to Indian villages is long overdue. When the national grid suffers its next huge outage, as it did in July 2012 when hundreds of millions were left in the dark, look for specks of light in the villages."countablesingularuncountable

5. (Europe software patent law) Automated production of material goods.Examples: "It is a classical and restricted view both of industry (it excludes service sectors, now 70% of the GDP of developed economies)[…]"Europecountableuncountable

6. (archaeology) A typological classification of stone tools, associated with a technocomplex.countableuncountable