The origin of the word “robot”
Where does the word robot come from? The story begins in Prague, in the early 1920s, with the Czech writer, playwright and critic Karel Čapek (1890–1938) and his play R.U.R. (Rossumovi univerzální roboti).
The word robot appeared in the first English translation (see bellow). Although Čapek did not originally invent it alone. According to Čapek’s own later account, the first idea came from his brother Josef, a painter and writer, who suggested the word when Karel was looking for a name for his artificial workers.
The Czech word robota referred to forced or compulsory labour, particularly the work performed by serfs. From this root came robot, quite literally, a worker. And this is important: Čapek’s robots were not machines in the modern sense. They were manufactured artificial beings, living organisms created to work. In the play, the factory produces them in enormous numbers as cheap, efficient labour. They are described as “living automats” and as workers designed specifically for their task.
The logic behind their creation is brutally simple. Young Rossum decides that human beings are unnecessarily complicated: they feel, enjoy themselves, play music, fall in love and do many things that are irrelevant to work. His solution is to eliminate everything that does not contribute directly to productivity.
“He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work.”
And then comes the crucial sentence:
“He rejected man and made the Robot.”
The word therefore contains the original idea of the Robot: a being created by humans to work for humans.
But R.U.R. does not stop there. As the robots become more human-like, the relationship between creator and creation changes. They eventually revolt against humanity, and the play ends with the robots having destroyed almost all human beings. That theme, the artificial being becoming independent of and confronting its creator, would become one of the great recurring themes of science fiction (and also non-fiction now, see the AI debate).
So, before there were surgical robots, industrial robots or humanoid robots, there was robota.
J Granell, Sep 23, 2026
Do you want to read the play? Visit Project Gutemberg.