The Word Robot Came From a Czech Word for Forced Labor

Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. — Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, "Rossum's Universal Robots" — premiered at Prague's National Theatre on 25 January 1921. It was a story about manufactured workers who eventually overthrow the people who made them. The word for those workers was new.

Čapek had drafted the play in 1920 and could not find a name for his creatures. He wanted laboři, from the Latin labor, but disliked how synthetic it sounded. In a 1933 piece for the newspaper Lidové Noviny he gave the credit elsewhere: he had gone into his brother Josef's studio, where Josef was painting, and asked him what to call them. Josef, brush in his mouth, mumbled roboti. Karel kept it.

The Czech robota does not mean "work" in the everyday sense. It is the older word for the forced, unpaid labor that serfs owed their lord, abolished in the Habsburg lands in 1848 — itself derived from rab, slave. Čapek's robots are not gleaming machines. In R.U.R. they are flesh, mass-produced, and bound to a regime they did not consent to. The word brought that history with it.

Within a few years the Czech roboti had displaced "automaton" and "android" in language after language. The play itself is read less than it once was. The word it leaked into the world has not stopped working since.