Shakespeare wasn’t the only playwright to coin words that are now part of our everyday language!
Did you know that robot also comes to us from a play? Karel Capek, a Czech playwright, wrote the popular play in the 1920s translated into English as “Rossum’s Universal Robots” or “R.U.R.” that was a raving success in New York. In the play, he has “mechanical persons” called robotniks (shortened to robot in English), which means, in Czech, “forced laborers.” Robotnik in turn comes from robota, which means “compulsory service, drudgery,” which takes its own root from robotiti, “to work, to drudge.”
The play debuted in New York in 1922, and by 1923, robot was considered an English word meaning “mechanical person.” According to the playwright, it was actually his brother Josef who came up with the word and used it first in a short story–the two often collaborated.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.