Learn English – the purpose of using the word “automagically” when we already have “automatically”

meaningsynonymsword-choice

Is there a difference between the two? I see it used regularly in the tech community to mean automatically.

Has the word been adopted into any recognised dictionary?

For example:

That was the day I officially stopped
caring what version Chrome is. I mean,
I care in the sense that sometimes I
need to check its dogtags in battle,
but as a regular user of Chrome, I no
longer think of myself as using a
specific version of Chrome, I just …
use Chrome. Whatever the latest
version is, I have it automagically.

— Jeff Atwood (The Infinite Version)

Best Answer

This comes from computer jargon, and the jargon file lists it.

Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See magic. “The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes cc(1) to produce an executable.”

This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s in jargon and probably much earlier. The word ‘automagic’ occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.

Automagically implies certain 'magic' going on behind the scenes.

In Atwood's example it might be a bit too much or just appropriate. It depends on when it was written: today automatic updating is common, but it did not use to be. In the days when it was not common the term "automagically" fits very nicely.

It also fits well to describe the change, if the process required user action before, you can say that now it happens automagically.

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