Science Fact - 20

The word 'robot' was introduced by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) in 1920.

However, Karel Čapek did not coin the word for the play, his brother did! Karel wrote a letter to the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.

In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested roboti. The word robota literally means corvée, serf labor, and figuratively drudgery or hard work in Czech. It also means work and labor in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, archaic Czech).