Etymology

Noun

1. a person who is part machine, a robot who is part organic
2. a robot who has an organic past

Quotations

• 1981, Teri (Pettit at PARC-MAXC), fa.sf-lovers newsgroup, "Re: SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #122", May 15:

  I would not classify the Tin Woodman as magical robot, but more of a magical cyborg, if anything.

• 1991, Timothy K. Smith, "Manfred Clynes Sees A Pattern in Love -- He's Got the Printouts", The Wall Street Journal, September 24, front page:

  Prof. Clynes is a published poet and author of five books. He coined the word "cyborg". He also coined the word "sentics" to describe a new science entirely of his own devising.

• 2002, Thomas Jones, "Short Cuts", London Review of Books Vol. 24 No. 18, September 19:

  ... Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics at Reading University. Warwick is no stranger to publicity. His autobiography, I, Cyborg, which came out last month (Century, £16.99), meticulously catalogues his very many newspaper, magazine, radio and TV appearances. With commendable honesty, he also acknowledges the amount of (unfair, obviously) criticism he has received for being greedy for media attention. That isn't the main thrust of the book, though, which is rather an account of why he is turning himself into a cyborg.

• 2003, David Simpson, "Are we still tragic?", guardian.co.uk (exclusive from London Review of Books Vol. 25 No. 7, April 3), April 1:

  The cyborg subject, with its pacemakers, drug regimes and artificial limbs, is usually also the first world middle to upper-class economic subject with a conscious incentive to preserve life for as long as possible under the best possible conditions.

• 2003, Anthony Lane, "The Current Cinema -- Metal Guru", The New Yorker, July 14:

  On the track of John and Kate is the T-X (Kristanna Loken), a blond female cyborg so metallically single-minded, and so impervious to blandishment and punishment alike, that, from where I was sitting, she looked to be our best hope of getting a woman into the Oval Office.