New Word

Did you know that such a common word as robot was taken from the Czech language? Robot, which comes from the Czech word robota, meaning "serf labor," was introduced to the world in 1920 by the influential Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play Rossum's Universal Robots. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots. Although Karel Čapek was best known as a science fiction author, he was also involved in politics, interviewing the First Republic's President for his book Talks with T. G. Masaryk, and even wrote children's stories. (Picture: President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and writer Karel Čapek, Courtesy of the Archives of the Masaryk Institute at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.)