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 or robot designed to follow a precise sequence of instructions.
noun A person who acts like a machine or robot, often defined as having a monotonouslifestyle and lacking in emotion.
noun A formal system, such as finite automaton.
noun A toy in the form of a mechanicalfigure.
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
[Latin, self-operating machine, from Greek, from neuter of automatos, self-acting; see automatic.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
From Ancient Greek αὐτόματον (automaton), neuter of αὐτόματος (automatos, "self moving, self willed").
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Examples
The automaton is all that is left of his previous life.
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.
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
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.
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.
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