robot

ˈrō-ˌbät

A Czech word for compulsory labour became the name of a stage machine.

Try robot in the lookup

Fills the word field on the homepage. Nothing is sent until you submit.

Wood-and-brass stage automaton with a blank porcelain face peeking from behind a deep teal curtain. — Decorative illustration

One possible route

The sequence below follows the cited Merriam-Webster entry.

A word routeLanguage forms named in the cited Merriam-Webster entry

Czechrobotacompulsory labour, drudgery
R.U.R.robota name suggested for the play1920
Englishrobotfirst known use (Merriam-Webster); 1923 in other cited dictionaries1922

A stage word steps into English

Czech robota means compulsory labour or drudgery. Merriam-Webster recounts that Josef Čapek suggested robot for his brother Karel's 1920 play R.U.R. and records the English word in 1922; the Online Etymology Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary both place its English arrival in 1923, with the play's translation. Both dates are kept here, scoped to the dictionary that reports them.

This page summarizes the cited dictionary entries. Follow each source for its full wording, notes and references.

More from the cited entries

Word-specific details from the linked dictionaries, with the dictionary named beside each claim.

The play that carried the word

R.U.R. — Rossum's Universal Robots — is Karel Čapek's 1920 play about manufactured workers. The Online Etymology Dictionary records its New York Theatre Guild debut on October 9, 1922, and, citing Rawson, adds that the word was popularized by Karel's play “but was coined by his brother Josef … who used it initially in a short story.”

The dictionaries date it differently: Merriam-Webster's first known use is 1922, while the Online Etymology Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary date English robot to 1923. No cited source explains the split, so this page shows each dictionary's date rather than averaging them.

What robota meant

The Online Etymology Dictionary unpacks the Czech: robota is “forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,” from robotiti “to work, drudge,” with robotnik as the forced worker. It is akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota, “servitude,” from rabu, “slave,” traced to a Proto-Indo-European root *orbh-, “to pass from one status to another.”

Merriam-Webster notes robota is akin to Old High German arabeit and to Latin orbus; the Online Etymology Dictionary adds that the Slavic word is cousin to German Arbeit, “work,” and the same root family, via a different branch, also produced English orphan. Those are kinships, not the borrowing path: the word entered English from Czech through the play.

Not the metal men of later fiction

The American Heritage Dictionary's word history corrects the popular picture: Čapek's original robots were not assembled from metal but made of “something like flesh and blood” — their flesh mixed like dough, their nerves and veins spun on spinners — and in Czech the play distinguishes robot and robotka for the male and female versions. The metal-and-silicon image belongs to later 20th-century science fiction.

A shorter descendant arrived much later: Etymonline dates the internet sense of bot — clipped from robot — to around 2000, and lists robotic and robotics as the word's derivative forms.

Keep following words

Continue with another source-linked example.

All ten examples