In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures (, from Latin ). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested . The word means literally , and figuratively in Czech and also (more general) in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian, Ukrainian and archaic Czech) as well as in Hungarian. Traditionally the (Hungarian ) was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically six months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic ( in contemporary Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root . Robot is cognate with the German .
In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures (, fr,om Latin ). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested . The word means literally  and figuratively in Czech and also (more general) in many Slavic languages (e.g.: Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Slovak, Polish, Macedonian Ukrainian and archaic Czech) as well as in Hungarian. Traditionally the (Hungarian ) was the work period a serf (corvée) had to give for his lord, typically six months of the year. The origin of the word is the Old Church Slavonic ( i,n contemporary Bulgarian, Macedonian and Russian), which in turn comes from the Proto-Indo-European root . Robot is cognate with the German .