clean room

noun

1. a room in which contaminants such as dust are reduced to a very low level by special procedures so that operations such as the manufacture and assembly of delicate equipment or the manipulation of biological materials can be performed effectively.

clean room

/ klēn /

1. A room that is maintained free of contaminants, such as dust or bacteria. Clean rooms are used in laboratory work and in the production of precision parts for electronic or aerospace equipment.
2. Also called white room

Word History and Origins

Origin of clean room¹

An Americanism dating back to 1960–65

Example Sentences

They are all connected to the web, and everyone thinks that, oh it’s much better to work sitting at a desk instead of working in a clean room.

From Los Angeles Times

Engineers custom built a sealed clean room with a 24-foot ceiling, and anyone entering had to don head-to-toe white bunny suits and blue latex gloves, lending day-to-day activities the ambience of a crime scene.

From Seattle Times

The new nanopatterning technique, developed in the lab of Professor Alexander Gaeta, is a simple way to modify materials with light -- and it doesn't involve an expensive and resource-intensive clean room.

From Science Daily

Such mass production would make it cheaper than typical ionizers that often require manual labor, need expensive hardware to interface with the mass spectrometer, or must be built in a semiconductor clean room.

From Science Daily

I got to go in the clean room and be there for those moments when we first laid eyes on the sample.

From New York Times