“Picture” - c.1420, from L. pictura “painting,” from pictus, pp. of pingere “to make pictures, to paint, to embroider,” (see paint). The verb, in the mental sense, is from 1738; pictures “movies,” short for moving pictures, is from 1912. Picture post-card first recorded 1899. Phrase every picture tells a story first attested 1906, in an advertisement for kidney pills; a picture is worth a thousand words (1921), said to be a Confucian proverb, first recorded in a printers’ professional journal.

The word robot was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), published in 1920. The play begins in a factory that makes artificial people called robots, but they are closer to the modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. They can plainly think for themselves, though they seem happy to serve. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of their treatment. However, Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator. In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři (from Latin labor, work). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested “roboti”. The word robota means literally work, labor or serf labor, and figuratively “drudgery” or “hard work” in Czech and many Slavic languages. Traditionally the robota was the work period a serf had to give for his lord, typically 6 months of the year. Serfdom was outlawed in 1848 in Bohemia, so at the time Čapek wrote R.U.R., usage of the term robota had broadened to include various types of work, but the obsolete sense of “serfdom” would still have been known. The word robotics, used to describe this field of study, was coined by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

“Android” - From Ancient Greek ἀνδρός (andros), genitive of ἀνήρ (anēr, “man”) + -eides (“of the species; alike”) < eidos (“species”)

“Droid” - From android via apocope [From Latin, from Ancient Greek ἀποκοπή (apokopḗ), ἀποκόπτω (apokóptō, “cut off”)]. Originally written with an apostrophe, as ’droid.