Robot

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɹəʊ.bɒt/

Definitions

  1. A machine designed to perform tasks automatically often resembling human actions
  2. An automated device capable of carrying out functions usually requiring human effort
  3. A mechanical device programmed to execute sequences of operations like a human

Etymology: The first robots had no gears, no wires and no metal. In Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., written in 1920, they are made from a synthetic living substance: artificial people, cheap and tireless, who in the final act rise up and wipe out humanity. Čapek nearly called them something else. As he told the story years later, he first thought of "labori", from Latin "labor", but it struck him as too bookish. He asked his brother Josef, a painter, who was working at his canvas and answered with a brush in his mouth: then call them "roboti". Josef had reached for "robota", a Czech word for drudgery and servitude, and in particular the unpaid labour a serf owed his lord, a system the Habsburg lands abolished only in 1848. German had borrowed the word for that feudal due, and English had in fact taken it in once already by that route, as a term for Central European serfdom. Behind it lies Proto-Slavic "orbъ", slave, from a Proto-Indo-European root, "*h₃erbʰ-", usually glossed as "to change status". The same root gives German "Arbeit", Old English "earfoþe" ("hardship") and, through Greek "orphanos", the English orphan. Russian "rabotnik" and Polish "robotnik", "worker", are often named as the source, but they are only cousins. The word came from Prague. The play's full title was Rossum's Universal Robots. It opened at Prague's National Theatre in January 1921, and Paul Selver's English translation, which kept Čapek's coinage, reached New York in 1922 and London the following year. English speakers took the word up at once, and it soon displaced the older "automaton". The creatures themselves changed on the way. Čapek's soft-bodied workers hardened in the public imagination into clanking metal men, and a word for a serf came to mean any machine that does a task on its own. In 1941 Isaac Asimov, writing a short story, added "robotics", a term he believed already existed until he learned he had coined it.

Synonyms: automaton, android, machine, cyborg, droid

Antonyms: human, person, individual