bot

1 of 3

noun (1)

1
: robot
Bennett's referring to … a new police robot. It looks similar to the Albuquerque Bomb Squad robot next to it—both have cameras, an articulated arm, a mechanical gripper, and tank-like treads. But Benett's bot is different; it has brains.Popular Science
2
a
: a computer program that performs automatic repetitive tasks : agent sense 5
Several shopping "bots" will track down prices for on-line merchandise from a variety of vendors.Sam Vincent Meddis
especially : one designed to perform a malicious action
These bot programs churn away all day and night, prodding at millions of random IP addresses looking for holes to crawl through. Jennifer Tanaka
b
: a computer that has been infected with a bot and can be used for malicious purposes as part of a network of infected computers
These proxies then sent instructions to worker bots in set patterns, including templates for spam creation.Jeff Hecht
3
: a computer program or character (as in a game) designed to mimic the actions of a person

bot

2 of 3

noun (2)

variants or less commonly bott
: the larva of a botfly
especially : one infesting the horse

bot

3 of 3

abbreviation

1
botanical; botanist; botany
2
bottle
3
bottom
4
bought

Examples of bot in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
Noun
Over the past year, Musk has complained about OpenAI and other AI companies scraping the data of his social media company X, formerly Twitter, to help train their bots. Julian Mark, Washington Post, 1 Mar. 2024 Human verification involves confirming that a real person, not an automated bot, operates a social media account. Guy Tytunovich, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2024 These conversations will still be saved for up to a month by OpenAI, but they won’t be included in model training, the bot’s Memory, or your chat history. Reece Rogers, WIRED, 26 Feb. 2024 ServiceNow recently added Now Assist to its Virtual Agent bot to drive faster resolutions via conversational AI chat. Robert Defrancesco, Forbes, 28 Feb. 2024 In some responses, the bots appeared to pull from outdated or inaccurate sources, highlighting problems with the electoral system that election officials have spent years trying to combat and raising fresh concerns about generative AI’s capacity to amplify longstanding threats to democracy. Garance Burke, Fortune, 27 Feb. 2024 And investigative reporting points toward a disinformation network being run out of the Kremlin, which includes social media bots deployed on Ukrainian sites spreading stories of Zelenskyy’s team being corrupt and warning that the war would go badly. Tara Sonenshine, The Conversation, 26 Feb. 2024 Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts. Kevin Collier, NBC News, 26 Feb. 2024 These new bots swarm websites not to catalog content but to feed that content to AI, a technology that threatens to replace search as the default means of online discovery (and does so by digesting and regurgitating the content in a monstrous, unciteable form). Longreads, 16 Feb. 2024

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bot.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Etymology

Noun (1)

by shortening

Noun (2)

Middle English; akin to Dutch leverbot liver fluke

First Known Use

Noun (1)

1969, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Noun (2)

15th century, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of bot was in the 15th century

Dictionary Entries Near bot

Cite this Entry

“Bot.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bot. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Kids Definition

bot

1 of 2 noun
ˈbät
: the larva of a botfly

bot

2 of 2 noun
1
: robot
2
: a computer program that performs automatic, repetitive, and sometimes harmful tasks
3
: a computer program or character that mimics human actions

Medical Definition

bot

1 of 2 noun
variants also bott
: the larva of a botfly
especially : one infesting the horse

bot

2 of 2 abbreviation
1
botanical; botanist; botany
2
bottle

More from Merriam-Webster on bot

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