A cyborg starts as a living organism and has artificial parts added — the biology comes first. An android is a machine built to resemble a human; there is no organism involved at any point. By the loosest definition, anyone with a pacemaker is a cyborg, which is exactly the argument the word was coined to provoke.
The core difference
- cyborg — a living being with integrated artificial components. Organic first.
- android — a robot built to look and act human. Artificial throughout.
Where the words come from
Cyborg is a 1960 coinage compressing "cybernetic organism", proposed for humans adapted to survive in space. Android is much older, from Greek andr-, man, plus -oid, resembling — a thing shaped like a man.
A distinction the words make that others do not
Robot covers any machine that performs tasks, human-shaped or not. An android is the subset built to look human. Humanoid is looser still and describes anything roughly human in shape, including aliens.
The real-world sense
Because the cyborg definition only requires integrated artificial components, cochlear implants, pacemakers and prosthetic limbs all arguably qualify. That is not a stretch of the word — the point of coining it was to describe exactly that continuum.
