A factory is an industrial site where goods are produced, usually by machine.

The term manufacture has come to have similar industrial and large-scale connotations, but the word originally meant anything produced by a crafter.

The word manufacture comes from the latin manus, meaning 'hand', and factus, meaning 'made' or 'having been made', and this is the meaning the word would carry until industrialisation changed the way in which the majority of goods were produced. So things were manufactured before there were factories.