cottage industry

noun

1

: an industry whose labor force consists of family units or individuals working at home with their own equipment

2

: a small and often informally organized industry

3

: a limited but enthusiastically pursued activity or subject

this debate about sex and law became a cottage industry for feminist academics

—Wendy Kaminer

Examples of cottage industry in a Sentence

weaving, pottery, and other cottage industries

Recent Examples on the Web

The prevalence of pythons, and the difficulty of removing them, has spawned a cottage industry of python hunters. —Christian Zilko, IndieWire, 12 Mar. 2025

There’s a whole cottage industry of media covering how those companies went terribly wrong. —Bloomberg, The Mercury News, 19 Feb. 2025

And there’s a cottage industry out there of Democratic strategists. —Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, 6 Feb. 2025

Now a head swirling media cottage industry of its own, the whole shabang is set to go to trial on March 29, 2026 in New York federal court. —Dominic Patten, Deadline, 14 Feb. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1849, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for cottage industry

• interindustry