Where Did the Word Robot Come From, Anyway?

Good is here to answer your query.

From the piece...

“Robot” has a refreshingly clear-cut origin. As Oxford English Dictionary Chief Editor John Simpson writes, “In 1920 the Czech writer Karel Čapek published his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)—in Czech, but with a strange new word (in English) in the title. Čapek said that the word was suggested to him by his brother Josef (from Czech robota ‘forced labour, drudgery’).” Čapek’s play featured artificial creatures that were biological rather than mechanical, created to do crappy jobs. That play made its way to New York in 1922, and the robot invasion of English was underway.

The 1920s saw the word breed like bunny-bots. As early as 1923, it was being used for cold, emotionless people, a sense Tim Siedell revisited recently: “A remote sub made the Gulf leak worse. Stories appear about Al Gore's sex life. All in all, a pretty bad week for robots.” The 1920s also saw the first uses of “robot clerk,” “robot plane,” “robot station,” “robot army,” “robotesque,” and “robotian,” and by the end of the decade, automatic street lights were also called "robots."

One of the more violent meanings didn’t emerge till World War II: the “robot bomb” of the Germans, which was self-propelled and also called a “doodle bug,” “robot airplane,” and “robomb.” In the mid-1980s, software robots popped up, showing the tendency of “robot” to be used much like “smart” for any program or device that has some autonomy.

Though science fiction (especially in the movies) has dominated our collective sense of robot-itude, robots are far from a fantasy these days. You don’t have to peruse magazines like New Scientist or Robot for long to see examples of real robots that can fly, cook, bow, dance, shake hands, climb rocks, work as a team, and assist geriatric patients.