robotic
Americanadjective
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in the manner of a robot; mechanical; lacking human intelligence or emotion.
He’s so constant and efficient that he looks robotic on the ice, and his scores for artistic performance suffer.
-
performed by a robot without active guidance from a human operator.
Over the course of several robotic missions, NASA gathered information about the surface of Mars and its atmosphere.
Etymology
Origin of robotic
First recorded in 1925–30; robot ( def. ) + -ic ( def. )
Explanation
Something is robotic if it moves or behaves like a machine. If you express no emotion and do things in an automatic-seeming way, your friends might say you're robotic. The adjective robotic can describe something related to the use of robots, like a robotic technique for dismantling a bomb or a robotic tool for surgery. Often, it's used to describe a person who reminds you of a robot: "She gets good grades, but she's so robotic! All she does is work — never has any fun!" Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov is credited with the first use of robotic in 1941.
Vocabulary lists containing robotic
Vocabulary from "There Will Never Be an Age of Artificial Intimacy," by Sherry Turkle
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
My best answer, after getting through the oddly robotic “personal growth” chapter and rereading that New York magazine profile, is “Work.”
From Slate ● Sep. 18, 2026
"The underlying algorithms that we were using for most of these robotic simulations they hark back to the 1970s and 1980s, but those algorithms are not really brilliant fits for GPUs," Storey says.
From BBC ● Sep. 17, 2026
Improving robotic brains is one of the key ways that the recent wave of humanoid firms can make their robots actually useful.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 5, 2026
The company has closed or consolidated over 20 manufacturing facilities in the past several years while deploying robotic automation and AI to streamline operations on everything from product development to supply chains and manufacturing.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 2, 2026
He moved with stiff, robotic jerks and swivels.
From "Tradition" by Brendan Kiely
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
