“Robot” and “Orphan”

The English word “orphan” comes, via Latin, from the Greek orphanós, which derives from the Proto-Indo-European h₃órbʰos, meaning “orphan”, or “slave, servant”.  It was that second meaning which produced Proto-Slavic *orbъ “slave”, from which was derived the noun *orbota “hard work, slavery”, which produced the Czech robota “forced labor”.  In 1920, the Czech author  Karel Čapek coined the word robot from robota in his sci-fi play Rossum’s Universal Robots, about an industrialist who creates artificial humans as laborers (who eventually rebel against their masters).  It was through that play that the word “robot” entered the English language, although in the original play the robots were organic creatures, rather than the mechanical entities the word is used for today.