Slang & Culture
Bot / AI Bot
Extremely common informal term for an automated software agent, now widely applied to AI chat assistants and AI-generated social accounts ("that reply was written by a bot").
Origin · no single documented coiner
Shortened from "robot," coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") — Čapek credited his brother Josef with the word, derived from the Old Church Slavonic "robota," meaning forced labor. The specific software sense of "bot" has no single documented coiner; it emerged through 1980s-90s online culture as informal shorthand.