Robots

Robot has an unusual origin, for a science fiction word: it is probably the only word in the SF lexicon that was first used in a play, and one of a very few words borrowed from another language. Robot comes from robota, the Czech word for "forced labor." Karel Capek used it in his play R.U.R. (1920, English translation 1923) to describe an artificial being, although he credited his brother Josef with the idea of using that word. Unlike the mechanical robots we think of today, Capek's robots were artificial biological creatures, created to do menial labor for humans. Almost immediately after the work appeared in English, writers began using the word figuratively to describe people they perceived to be behaving like automatons. Science fiction writers quickly picked up the word and applied it to mechanical creations, although Capek's original sense still crops up from time to time.

Science fiction writers also spun off a variety of derivatives. Three of them, robotic, robotics, and roboticist, all came from the pen of Isaac Asimov, who also created (with John W. Campbell, Jr.) the robots' programmed-in code of ethics known as the three laws of robotics. Other SF writers gave us the forms robotical, robotically, and roboticized. In the 1960s, the word was shortened to 'bot (or sometimes just bot). Robot also got shortened into the combining form robo-, which can indicate the form or purpose of a robot, as in roboplane and robobar.

Outside of science fiction, the word robot has had an even more varied career. The most common use refers to any of a variety of automated machines, particularly those that are controlled remotely or by computer. Such machines can be known simply as robots, or can appear in various compounds such as "robot bomb." Other senses, not treated elsewhere in this dictionary, include: an automated computer program that interacts with other programs or processes (such as a Web crawler); a traffic signal; a popular dance involving jerky motions; and the suffix -bot. The OED additionally lists more than a dozen other derivatives, including roboteer, robothood, robotize, robotomorphic, and roboty.

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