How to Use automaton in a Sentence

automaton

noun
  • Many of the mannequins loom high above us, an army of chic automatons.
    — Jed Perl, The New York Review of Books, 4 July 2026
  • And stocks always glitch—to the delight of those bond-buying automatons.
    — Andy Kessler, WSJ, 13 Jan. 2019
  • That is not to say that periodization wants to produce teams of automatons.
    — Rory Smith, New York Times, 26 Apr. 2017
  • The automatons even shake and stir the drink before pouring into the glass, which is then pushed through a slot at the end of the bar.
    — Andrew Craft, Fox News, 7 July 2017
  • At the time, the idea of an automaton being used to commit crime was a novelty.
    — Philip Bump, Washington Post, 12 June 2017
  • People are not mere automatons driven by the forces of society.
    — Matt Fleming, Oc Register, 20 Sep. 2025
  • Dolls, figurines, and automatons show our long-standing interest in building things that look and act like us.
    — Gerui Wang, Forbes, 8 Dec. 2024
  • The Flute Player was a sort of pre-robot called an automaton.
    — Kat Eschner, Smithsonian, 24 Feb. 2017
  • Civilian kitchens aren’t equipped with machines that have automaton-like limbs to bring together a dough.
    — New York Times, 10 Oct. 2019
  • These automatons are working faster than what the human hand can achieve, yes, but that doesn’t mean quality is compromised.
    — Stacia Datskovska, Footwear News, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Little automatons toured the country—dolls controlled by clockwork.
    — Alexander Sammon, Harper's Magazine, 8 Apr. 2022
  • Too many companies treat their offshore teams as automatons to close tickets without a word exchange between them.
    — Emilien Coquard, Forbes, 2 Oct. 2024
  • In a world of cookie-cutter pop-music stars and automatons, Sinéad O’Connor was a one-off.
    — George Varga, San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 July 2023
  • His women and men came out like automatons on his runways and moved like bullets, which was a whole new way of presenting unembellished clothes.
    — Hamish Bowles, Vogue, 17 Sep. 2024
  • The automaton dances in dainty circles to the rhythm of a drip algorithm as hot water trickles into the filter.
    — NBC News, 20 May 2020
  • Lucero, if nothing else, is a robotic outrage automaton, like many of his contemporaries.
    — Prem Thakker, The New Republic, 27 June 2023
  • Birds are automatons with a repertoire of preprogrammed behavior.
    — Anelise Chen, The Atlantic, 25 Feb. 2025
  • The game is set in a kind of computational universe called a cellular automaton.
    — The Physics Arxiv Blog, Discover Magazine, 13 Dec. 2023
  • The purpose of bureaucracy is to turn people into automatons.
    — Robert Zubrin, National Review, 18 Sep. 2019
  • Our attachment to these automatons is all the more remarkable because they weren’t designed to forge human connections; they were built to do a job.
    — Daniel Oberhaus, Wired, 30 Apr. 2020
  • Both spotlight machinery, one boasting a drone, the other a female automaton.
    — The New Yorker, 20 Sep. 2024
  • The equities side of Wall Street, including me, always writes off bond investors as automatons.
    — Andy Kessler, WSJ, 13 Jan. 2019
  • And — reading on — the flutes made of bone, the zoos, the purple dye made from snails, the roulette, the automatons of digesting and defecating ducks, and Minecraft.
    — Virginia Heffernan, New York Times, 22 Nov. 2016
  • Most people, though, thought that Maelzel’s chess player was a fake—not a thinking machine at all, but a simple automaton controlled by a human.
    — Kat Eschner, Smithsonian, 20 July 2017
  • But even if a treacherous automaton had wormed its way into that position, a human would have to program, monitor and maintain the thing.
    — Greg Jefferson, ExpressNews.com, 14 Feb. 2020
  • Look out, too, for a reproduction of an 18th-century automaton in the form of a life-size turbaned figure sitting at a chess board.
    — Washington Post, 10 Jan. 2020
  • Utility-maximising automatons might see the sense in buying mosquito nets over the internet for distant strangers.
    — The Economist, 2 June 2018
  • Notably, the development moves it from a stiff automaton toward a more capable machine.
    — Mrigakshi Dixit, Interesting Engineering, 5 Dec. 2025
  • The human’s task was relegated to pumping a foot pedal to create the pneumatic pressure that drove the automaton.
    — Adam Ozimek, The Atlantic, 11 Mar. 2026
  • Science looks into the latest efforts to make these anthropomorphic automatons, and uncover what may be on the horizon.
    — Andrew Wagner, Science | AAAS, 20 Dec. 2017

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

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