lab.

Noun

laboratory (plural laboratories)

1. A room, building or institution equipped for scientific research, experimentation or analysis.
2. A place where chemicals, drugs or microbes are prepared or manufactured.
   • Again she read the passage that had riveted her attention; and, rising from her seat, carried the still open volume, and laid it on a slab by the furnace in the laboratory: it was a celebrated treatise on poisons, written in the fifteenth century.1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], “The Laboratory”, in Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume II, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, page 325