The story
From sopho- + -ont. First used in the 1966 works by Poul Anderson, coined by his wife Karen Anderson.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
sophont
Today it means: An intelligent being; a being with a base reasoning capacity roughly equivalent to or greater than that of a human being. The word does not apply to machines unless they have true artificial intelligence, rather than mere processing capacity. Full definition →