means Relating to industry — the large-scale manufacturing of goods, or anything done on the heavy, mechanized, factory scale that industry implies.

from From Latin 'industria,' meaning diligence or purposeful activity — the same root that gives us 'industrious.' For centuries the word praised the busy, hardworking person. Then came the great factory boom, and 'industrial' shifted from describing human effort to describing the machines and systems that increasingly did that work instead — so the word that once meant 'hardworking' now mostly means 'made by something that never tires.'