Android

How to spell android

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce android

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does android mean?

1. nounA robot built to look and behave like a human being.

Android in a sentence

• The film featured an android that could pass for a real person.

• Engineers programmed the android to recognise faces and respond to speech.

Where does android come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek elements: andros, meaning 'man' or 'male human being', and the suffix -oeides, meaning 'having the form of' or 'resembling'. Put together they describe something shaped like a man. The combination was used in scientific Latin as androides as far back as the early 1700s to describe automata made in human form, and it surfaced in English by the same century. It stayed a fairly technical term until science fiction in the twentieth century adopted it for a manufactured being that closely imitates a living person. The same andr- root sits inside familiar words like 'androgynous' and the name 'Andrew', while the -oid ending links it to 'humanoid', 'asteroid', and 'planetoid', a useful clue that the spelling ends in -oid rather than -ode.

How the word is built

• andr- (from Greek aner, andros: man, male human)
• -oid (from Greek -oeides: resembling, having the form of)