Robot. Del hombre de arena al hombre de hierro

The paper deals with the long history of the word robot and related terms throughout the European languages. Robot, a word invented by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, nowadays is at the very heart of the Western imagery, both in movies and literary creations, since the first Asimov stories published during the forties of the past century. The modern fictional and technological scenarios describe many types of robots, thus spreading many new nouns. This is also a history of dreams and nightmares, of machines conceived and created by Greeks, Arabs, Europeans: a history which sheds light on the peculiar semantic values of words like Greek autómata, Hebrew gôlem and so forth.