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I found "o-matic" in my dashboard of wordpress.com. There is "Read-o-Matic". And there are some news from staff. What does it mean? I feel it's "recommended to read", isn't it?

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possible duplicate of What does the phrase 'Quote-O-Matic' mean? – aedia λ Sep 8 '11 at 17:46
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The close reason is the majority vote, but as you can see it is wrong, since we have a perfectly happy version of this question already. (And I think it's interesting.) – KitFox♦ Sep 8 '11 at 17:49

closed as too localized by Mitch, simchona♦, z7sg Ѫ, aedia λ, KitFox♦ Sep 8 '11 at 17:48

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

This term comes from a number of American mechanical devices, and "omatic" is short for "automatic."

The so-called "Veg-o-matic" was an automatic vegetable slicer.

"Mince-o-matic" was an automatic meat mincer.

And "read-o-matic" would be an automatic reader (machine).

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Does anyone know of the first use of this?

It seems a 1950s term, the only example I can find is Ford's first automatic transmission the "cruise-o-matic" in 1958.

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Goes back to the 1920s judging by ngrams. Earliest thing I can find is the Williams Oil-O-Matic. That actually sounds like automatic too. adclassix.com/images/25williamsoilfurnace.jpg – z7sg Ѫ Sep 8 '11 at 17:31
@z7sg - Couldn't get ngrams to work with the hyphen. Do you need a special syntax? – mgb Sep 8 '11 at 17:39
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But you answer a different question than the one given. – Theta30 Sep 8 '11 at 17:44
No I just searched for Matic rather than matic, as that excludes a lot of OCR hyphenation errors. – z7sg Ѫ Sep 8 '11 at 17:45
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@Theta30 - yes but the question was already correctly answered, I was just trying to broaden it a little, Possibly should have been a comment to Tom's answer – mgb Sep 8 '11 at 17:47
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