I won’t bore you with pedantries - though I’d love to.

Like so much in the living language, "droid" is an orphaned word derived from a misunderstanding, then gaining a life of its own for being short and catchy.

"Android" is a term with mixed ancestry, and (we assume) parent of the contraction "droid." Thank you, George Lucas.

French language Andréide  translates ‘man’ plus ‘of like kind.’ English ‘Android’ derives from ‘(hu-)man’ and ‘resembling.’ Both words, of course, comprising a prefix "andr" (hu-man) plus suffixes  -éide or -oid respectively.

Eyes glazing over yet?

So popular laziness with the language - a human specialty - creates a new word from thin air .. "droids," now acquiring their own prefixes.

One such is our favorite, the BattleDroid.

Since every American soldier has seen Star Wars films, as, no doubt, has every American journalist, we are pretty-well stuck with military robots being called BattleDroids. Expect to become weary of hearing grunts in war films say "Send in the droids."

And please note, dear reader, this website could easily have been named DroidsHeaven.com. In fact, we had this entire series of domain names registered but funds being as they were could not sustain the fees in addition to similarly-related variations of "bot" and "robot." Hence our categories - based on the suffix "bot" - means military robots are "MilBots" not "BattleDroids."

Entiendes?

The image atop this article

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