Naturally, the right answer to give the inquisitive child who asks this is to say, “They gave it to us.” When asked who they are, you are free to elaborate however you wish to build your psychological domination of the nasty child. But if you are interested in the truth about this word origin, Howard Markel gives it to us. Robot was the creation of Czech playwright Karel Čapek in his 1920s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Of course, it’s a play about mechanized men who break their labor union contracts and try to take over the world. File that under The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same (via Books, Inq.)
This is a fact well-known to crossword enthusiasts, because it often figures in the clue to the answer “RUR,” a handy word for jamming into a troublesome grid. But I still don’t know anything more about the play than that it was the groundbreaking robot fiction — plus what you’ve educated me with here today. I take it, like most robot/android fiction, it was a rumination on our tendency to treat our menial workers as less than human, and on the question of when a rational construct acquires a soul and becomes a proper object of love? Pygmalion, Pinocchio, Bladerunners, the Dinkum Thinkum, Adam & Eve?
I don’t know more than what is written in the article to which I linked.
Hey! I guessed right!
And I do like to be right.
Without using Google or Bing, my memory tells me that it’s from a Czech word meaning “drudge.”
OK, so now let’s see if I’m right… Hmmm. According to Wikipedia, it means “forced labor of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters’ land.”