Page "Ansible" Paragraph 1

The word ansible was coined by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1966 novel Rocannon's World.

Le Guin states that she derived the name from " answerable ," as the device would allow its users to receive answers to their messages in a reasonable amount of time, even over interstellar distances.

Her award-winning 1974 novel The Dispossessed, a book in the Hainish Cycle, tells of the invention of the ansible.