Etymologists, Linguists, know-it-alls : Help!
a quick search indicates that it is short for “plantation”
also from Reddit:
Latin “planta” can mean either a plant or the sole of your foot, and planto/plantare means to set down or set in place as well as to plant a crop.
A bit fuzzy, but the concensus seems to be that it has to do with settling down in one spot, “planting” your factory there. this would mean it went from first being a verb (“I will plant my factory here”) to being a noun (“this is my plant”).
Yes, got to watch out for those ‘heavy plant crossings’…
So- speculatively!- some 18th-century visionary thought of planting machinery rather than vegetables, or of preparing ground for industrial operations. “Planta” in Latin can also mean the sole of the foot, ultimately from a root meaning “flat” or “to spread”, as in plane. “Planto” (the verb) can mean “fix in place”, as in English, hence to form, make.
Looking at the OED, it appears that “plant” had an obsolete meaning of “something that sprung up,” so it may be due to the fact that the factory was built quickly out of nothing.
Amusingly, the first entry in the definition of “plant” as “factory” is one of someone being perplexed by the usage:
A guess, but does it relate primarily, if inconsistently, to the idea of machinery and infrastructure that is fixed in place because of its size or function, as opposed to a gyn [-> gin -> engine] which would refer to something more movable or portable? Its an installation that does something, rather than being a manufactory where things are made.
Heavy machinery is referred to as plant, although I understand that’s more a British than US usage. Early steam engines were either built in situ or lumbered into place and then planted in one location and transferred power through drive trains and belts of various sorts. Both the traction engine and locomotive engine have adjectives reinforcing their essential nature of movement.
I appreciate everyone’s attempts at an explanation, however : the consensus reasoning that because an industrial complex may be placed in a (semi) permanent location is the reason for it being called a “plant” makes no more sense than say, a bank or a shoe store being referred to as a plant, which they are not.
Perhaps (and I’m basing this on a series of searches, and trying to distill it into a single, short explanation), it followed a sequence like this:
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One may figuratively plant an inanimate object in or on the ground (a hard surface). So, while the verb “to plant” and its Latin root might literally apply to a seed, I think we can all agree that it’s a perfectly acceptable use of the verb in English to say something like “I will go to that far shore, and plant my flag in the ground.” Or “Don’t bother hauling that box of shoes, just plant it by the door and we’ll come back for it when we have a cart.”
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Since we (and probably our 18th century linguistic ancestors) are now happy with the idea of “planting” an inanimate object not just in but on the ground, it’s an easy step to think that any large piece or collection of immobile equipment has been “planted.” Not just industrial or manufacturing equipment, mind you. So it’s not so much that it jumped right to “plant=manufacturing plant” but that the heavy equipment associated with a range of projects might be said to be planted in a location for a specific purpose. It could be for the purpose of making chemicals (a chemical plant), generating steam (a steam plant), storing/moving water (a water plant), or, yes, manufacturing (a manufacturing plant).
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At some point, this all gets muddled because all the processes we typically associate with some kind of heavy industrial equipment involves machinery, and so we just get to thinking of the world “plant” as a generic term for an area with a lot of machinery.
From a conversation found elsewhere on the subject:
snip<Just checked the OED 3. Not much help there as to its actual origins, just early references to it being used, mostly in quotes like ‘plant’, back to 1789. You’ll be pleased to know, though, that it also confused one “Mrs. Piozzi” in 1789: “The ground was destined to the purposes of extensive commerce, but the appellation of a plant gave me much disturbance, from my inability to fathom the meaning.”>snip
Apparently, the question has perplexed folks for centuries.
WAG: both are seen as primary producers
Nitpick for the thread title: “Plant” does not refer to the process, but to the premises, equipment, etc employed in the process.
I think the answer may be that “plant” implies premises purpose-built, equipment specially designed, etc, for an industrial process. There’s two related aspects to this; first, we only use the term in the context of some large-scale intensive industrial process; a dairy farm is not a “milk plant”, even though it may have a purpose built milking shed and specialist milking equipment. But a milk processing plant is a plant. Secondly, it’s these large-scale intensive processes which are most likely to require specialist buildings and/or equipment, which you have to construct, design, manufacture for the purpose. So you are “planting” in the sense of investing to establish something substantial that you expect to endure, in much the way that the early North American colonies were “planted”. A shoe store is not a “plant” because (a) you can rent any old shop premises and put boxes of shoes on the shelves; you don’t need specialist premises or equipment, and (b) there’s no industrial process involved.
Not always true. In control theory, “plant” refers to the process; or more specifically, the transfer function between input and output of a given system.
That said, the control theory definition (probably) comes from earlier usage in referring to the equipment itself.
Interesting. Besides the OP’s question about the origins of “plant” meaning “factory,” the big thing I learned from this thread is that the word “plant” was a verb “to set firmly in/on the ground” (itself rooted, ahem, in the noun for sole of the foot — familiar to us in “plantar warts/fasciitis”) before it was the now-very-common noun designating an entire kingdom of living things.
This made me think about “animal,” from the Latin for “spirit” or “mind.” Makes for a vivid contrast with “plant.” Basically, “stuck in the ground” vs. “free spirit.”
Now, how about “fungus”?
In several Romance languages it’s also a view, blueprint or schematic, esp. the one from the top (someone who can draft would use this word to refer only to the view from the top, someone who cannot may be fuzzier about usage). Also in multiple Romance languages, each of a building’s floors.
Which leads to the similar word used for land: plat.
One online dictionary says the verb origin is from plaiten. A word related to pleats. Doesn’t sound right. Others just refer to it being a variant of plot.
A shortening of plaiten to plat’n with the awkward last two sounds switched to plant is slightly plausible. But this sort of thing is usually too good to be true.
Side note: Mrs Piozzi (formerly Mrs Thrale) was a very prominent London intellectual, an extremely wealthy patron of the arts, and a close friend of Samuel Johnson for many years.
To confuse things, in English some of those things are spelled “plan”. (As opposed to a plant, plat, plane, plain, plait, or plot.)
Size may have something to do with it, if we take plant is short for plantation. A factory is much grander a scale then even a local cobbler. We wouldn’t call a small farm a plantation.
Perhaps it is also because they produce something, while a bank or shoe store simple are places to transfer goods and services from person to person.
The word ‘factory’ itself is the shortened word for ‘manufactury’ which you can see on older maps
Boringly, it’s from the Latin fungus, a mushroom or similar plant, or a fungal growth. The OED notes that it’s probably a loan-word from a non-Indo-European language, and that Greek has a probably-related word σϕόγγος, a sponge.