robot

Word History: Robot has been in English since 1923, when Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. was translated into English from Czech and presented in London and New York. The play's title, R.U.R., is an abbreviation of Rossum's Universal Robots, the name of a corporation in the play that makes robots to serve as slave labor for humanity. However, Čapek's robots—the original robots—are quite different from the standard-issue robots of later 20th-century science fiction, such as C3PO and R2D2 of Star Wars, that seem to be assembled from metal, silicon, and other non-biological materials. Čapek's robots are assembled out of something like flesh and blood, made according to a secret formula. Their flesh is mixed like dough in mixing machines and their nerves and veins are spun out on spinners. Eventually, during the course of the play, the robots grow tired of their subservient position and stage a rebellion that places the very future of humanity in peril. The robots take over the world, but it becomes clear that they also feel emotions like love and are worthy successors to humanity. Robot and robotka, the words Čapek uses in Czech for the male and female versions of these sentient biological automatons, are derived from the Czech word robota, "servitude, forced labor."