Lowell is a city in Massachusetts, in the United States. Alongside Cambridge, It is one of two normal seats of Middlesex County. With an estimated population of 115,554 in 2020, it was the fifth most populous city in Massachusetts as of the last census, and the third most populous in the Boston metropolitan statistical area. The city along with is part of a smaller Massachusetts statistical area, called Greater Lowell, and of New England’s Merrimack Valley region.

Incorporated in 1826 to assist as a mill town, Lowell was named after Francis Cabot Lowell, a local figure in the Industrial Revolution. The city became known as the cradle of the American Industrial Revolution because of its textile mills and factories. Many of Lowell’s historic manufacturing sites were well along preserved by the National Park Service to create Lowell National Historical Park. During the Cambodian genocide (1975–1979), the city took in an influx of refugees, leading to a Cambodia Town and America’s second largest Cambodian-American population.

Lowell is house to two institutions of forward-looking education. UMass Lowell, part of the University of Massachusetts system, has three campuses in the city. Middlesex Community College’s two campuses are in Lowell and in the town of Bedford, Massachusetts. Arts services in the city count the Whistler House Museum of Art, the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, the Lowell Memorial Auditorium, and Sampas Pavilion. In sports, the city has a long tradition of boxing, hosting the annual New England Golden Gloves boxing tournament. The city has a baseball stadium, Edward A. LeLacheur Park, and a multipurpose indoor sports arena, the Tsongas Center, both of which have hosted collegiate and minor-league professional sports teams.

Founded in the 1820s as a planned manufacturing middle for textiles, Lowell is located along the rapids of the Merrimack River, 25 mi (40 km) northwest of Boston in what was afterward the cultivation community of East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The so-called Boston Associates, including Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson of the Boston Manufacturing Company, named the supplementary mill town after their visionary leader, Francis Cabot Lowell, who had died five years previously its 1823 incorporation. As Lowell’s population grew, it acquired estate from against towns, and diversified into a full-fledged urban center. Many of the men who composed the labor force for constructing the canals and factories had immigrated from Ireland, escaping the poverty and Great Famine of the 1830s and 1840s. The mill workers, young single women called Mill Girls, generally came from the farm families of New England.