Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A self-operating machine or mechanism, especially a robot.
- noun One that behaves or responds in a mechanical way.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun That which is self-moving, or has the power of spontaneous movement, but is not conscious.
- noun Specifically A self-acting machine, or one which is actuated in such a manner as to carry on for some time certain movements without the aid of external impulse.
- noun A living being acting mechanically or as a mere machine, especially without consciousness; a person or an animal whose actions are purely involuntary or mechanical.
- noun A person who acts in a monotonous routine manner, without active intelligence, especially without being fully aware of what he is doing.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun Any thing or being regarded as having the power of spontaneous motion or action.
- noun A self-moving machine, or one which has its motive power within itself; -- applied chiefly to machines which appear to imitate spontaneously the motions of living beings, such as men, birds, etc.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
machine orrobot designed to follow a precise sequence of instructions. - noun A person who acts like a machine or robot, often defined as having a
monotonous lifestyle and lacking inemotion . - noun A
formal system , such as finite automaton. - noun A
toy in the form of amechanical figure .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun someone who acts or responds in a mechanical or apathetic way
- noun a mechanism that can move automatically
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The automaton is all that is left of his previous life.
The Invention of Hugo Cabret (copy) ____Maggie 2008
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The automaton is one of many built to help Lincoln hit the campaign trail and who subsequently became the sheriff of a small town.
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The automaton is all that is left of his previous life.
Archive 2008-07-01 ____Maggie 2008
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This year’s homework question was to find an interesting cellular automaton from the rule space of radius 3/2 with two colors.
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He became a visitor to the "Man with the Rolling Eye," though I believe he used to call my automaton "The Sheik of Baalbec."
The Blue Wall A Story of Strangeness and Struggle Richard Washburn Child 1908
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Thus, according to Descartes, the animal body is an automaton, which is competent to perform all the animal functions in exactly the same way as
Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews Thomas Henry Huxley 1860
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Eventually, having struck up a friendship with Mr Méliès's cute and adventurous niece Isabelle, Hugo discovers that the old man is none other than the real life great pre-war film-maker Georges Méliès, fallen on hard times and turning his face against his own gift - and that the automaton is a special link to him.
Evening Standard - Home David Sexton 2011
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We look here only to the necessity of the connection of events in a time-series as it is developed according to the physical law, whether the subject in which this development takes place is called automaton materiale when the mechanical being is moved by matter, or with Leibnitz spirituale when it is impelled by ideas; and if the freedom of our will were no other than the latter
The Critique of Practical Reason Immanuel Kant 1764
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Indeed Rivera manages to capture not just the feeling of intense activity in an automobile plant but the kind of automaton-like rhythm we associate with assembly-line production.
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An encounter with an eccentric girl and the owner of small toy kiosk in the train station sets in motion a mysterious adventure involving a stolen key, a treasured notebook, and an enigmatic mechanical man or "automaton" – with the real-life figure of cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès providing the crucial link between inventive fantasy and historical fact.
Martin Scorsese: '3D is liberating. Every shot is rethinking cinema' Mark Kermode 2010
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