laboratory

noun, often attributive

lab·o·ra·to·ry | \ ˈla-b(ə-)rə-ˌtȯr-ē

, sometimes ˈla-bər-ˌtȯr- or ˈla-bə-ˌtȯr- or lə-ˈbȯr-ə-ˌtȯr-, British usually lə-ˈbär-ə-t(ə-)rē

plural laboratories

Definition of laboratory

1a : a place equipped for experimental study in a science or for testing and analysis a research laboratory broadly : a place providing opportunity for experimentation, observation, or practice in a field of study

b : a place like a laboratory for testing, experimentation, or practice That area is a laboratory for cultivating the germ of terrorism.

2 : an academic period set aside for laboratory work a course of study requiring two lectures and one laboratory per week

Examples of laboratory in a Sentence

experiments conducted in a modern laboratory

Recent Examples on the Web

Many dogs, cats, primates and other research animals are killed in federal laboratories each year because agencies don’t have a policy that allows animals to find new homes after their testing has finished. — Tara Law, Time, "Senate Bill Could Save Many Federal Lab Animals' Lives and Give Them a New Home," 30 July 2019 Those fish -- caught in fresh and saltwater bodies across the state -- are analyzed in laboratories to determine how much of certain toxins a person might ingest by eating that fish. — Dennis Pillion | Dpillion@al.com, al.com, "What not to eat: Alabama’s 2019 fish consumption advisories," 17 July 2019 Studying these samples in laboratories on Earth helped to establish the modern field of planetary science and gave us crucial insights into geologic processes that operate on all planetary bodies. — Erica Jawin, Scientific American, "Apollo’s Bounty: The Science of the Moon Rocks," 2 July 2019 The prehistoric species is one some of them have only known through the blue blood used in Lonza's laboratories. — Maddy Lauria, baltimoresun.com, "Using synthetic crab blood substitute in biomedical testing could help save horseshoe crabs and shorebirds," 22 June 2019 In nearly two dozen underground laboratories scattered all over the earth, using vats of liquid or blocks of metal and semiconductors, scientists are looking for evidence of dark matter. — Wired, "Dark Matter Hunters Are Looking Inside Rocks for New Clues," 13 Jan. 2019 In nearly two dozen underground laboratories scattered all over the earth, using vats of liquid or blocks of metal and semiconductors, scientists are looking for evidence of dark matter. — Rebecca Boyle, WIRED, "Dark Matter Hunters Are Looking Inside Rocks for New Clues," 13 Jan. 2019 While work in laboratories will help define how life could spring from inanimate matter, space telescopes like Kepler, which ended operations last year, and TESS, which launched last year, are finding new planets to study. — David W. Brown, Smithsonian, "Searching for the Key to Life’s Beginnings," 2 July 2018 Rubbia ran the experiment, called Underground Area 1 (or UA1), a bold and ambitious project at CERN laboratory near Geneva that sought traces of W and Z bosons in the chaos of high-energy particle collisions. — Quanta Magazine, "A Call for Courage as Physicists Confront Collider Dilemma," 7 Aug. 2019

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'laboratory.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.