Noun

(en-noun)

(uncountable) Any substance that can be consumed by living organisms, especially by eating, in order to sustain life.

* {{quote-book, year=1922, author=(Ben Travers), title=(A Cuckoo in the Nest)

, chapter=1 citation , passage=“[…] the awfully hearty sort of Christmas cards that people do send to other people that they don't know at all well. You know. The kind that have mottoes like
  Here's rattling good luck and roaring good cheer, / With lashings of food and great hogsheads of beer. […]”}}

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-29, volume=407, issue=8842, page=72-3, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= A punch in the gut , passage=Mostly, the microbiome is beneficial. It helps with digestion and enables people to extract a lot more calories from their food than would otherwise be possible. Research over the past few years, however, has implicated it in diseases from atherosclerosis to asthma to autism.}}

(countable) A foodstuff.

(uncountable, figuratively) Anything that nourishes or sustains.

Mozart and Bach are food for my soul.

* (and other bibiographic particulars) (William Shakespeare)

This may prove food to my displeasure.

* (and other bibiographic particulars) (William Wordsworth)

In this moment there is life and food / For future years.

Noun

(en noun)

A machine built to carry out some complex task or group of tasks, especially one which can be programmed.

* 2010 , Tim Webb, The Guardian , 16 May 2010:

It's painfully slow and complex work which has never been attempted before in these conditions: the small box-shaped robots , equipped with two claws, are operating in almost freezing water 5,000ft below the surface, in pitch black and strong currents.

(chiefly, science fiction) An intelligent mechanical being designed to look like a human or other creature, and usually made from metal.

* 2010 , Tom Chivers and Iain McDiarmid, The Telegraph , 26 Jan 2010:

The robots in Dick's novel, loosely adapted by Ridley Scott into the film Blade Runner, were so similar to humans that when they went rogue, trained bounty hunters were called in to perform psychological tests to see whether suspected androids lacked human empathy.

(figuratively) A person who does not seem to have any emotions.

* Murray N. Rothbard, Making Economic Sense (page xiv)

Yet surely he was a humorless robot of a man, spewing forth lonely and bitter critiques of all those lesser mortals with whom he could not identify.

(South Africa) A traffic light (from earlier robot policeman ).

(surveying) A theodolite which follows the movements of a prism and can be used by a one-man crew.

A style of dance popular in disco whereby the dancer impersonates the movement of a robot