Word of the Day

: September 6, 2017

robot

noun ROH-baht

What It Means

1 a : a machine that looks like a human being and performs various complex acts (such as walking or talking) of a human being; also : a similar but fictional machine whose lack of capacity for human emotions is often emphasized

b : an efficient insensitive person who functions automatically

2 : a device that automatically performs complicated often repetitive tasks

3 : a mechanism guided by automatic controls

robot in Context

Isaac Asimov is famous for writing science-fiction stories about robots which were governed by specific laws of behavior.

"The six-girl team and their chaperone completed their journey just after midnight from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, to enter their ball-sorting robot in the three-day high school competition starting Sunday in the U.S. capital." — Josh Lederman, The St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch, 17 July 2017

Did You Know?

In 1920, Czech writer Karel Čapek published a play titled R.U.R. Those initials stood for "Rossum's Universal Robots," which was the name of a fictional company that manufactured human-like machines designed to perform hard, dull, dangerous work for people. The machines in the play eventually grew to resent their jobs and rebelled—with disastrous results for humans. During the writing of his play, Čapek consulted with his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, who suggested the name robot for these machines, from the Czech word robota, which means "forced labor." Robot made its way into our language in 1922 when R.U.R. was translated into English.