means Sustained, organized economic activity that produces goods or services — or, more abstractly, the quality of working hard and steadily.

from From Latin industria, 'diligence, activity,' tied to industrius, 'diligent, hardworking' — itself possibly from an older form meaning roughly 'building up from within.' English borrowed it in the 15th century purely as a personal virtue: industry was something a diligent soul had. Only later, as factories and mills multiplied, did the word migrate from the worker to the work itself — naming the whole machinery of mass production. The diligence never left; it just got incorporated.