Sprite

How to spell sprite

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce sprite

What does sprite mean?

1. nounA small, often mischievous supernatural being such as a fairy or elf, especially one linked to water or woodland.
2. nounA small two-dimensional graphic that can be moved and animated independently on a screen.

Sprite in a sentence

• The children's book describes a tiny sprite that lives beneath the waterfall.

• The game developer drew a new sprite for the player's character.

• Local legend claims a woodland sprite guards the old stone bridge.

• Each enemy in the retro game is rendered as a separate sprite.

Where does sprite come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Sprite is a worn-down form of the word 'spirit', and the two are genuinely the same word at root. The trail begins with the Latin spiritus, which literally meant 'breath' or 'breathing', from spirare 'to breathe', and which came to stand for the animating breath of life and then for an incorporeal being. Old French reshaped this into esprit, and Middle English borrowed it in the 1200s and 1300s, where it was sometimes clipped and respelled as 'sprite' or 'spright'. Over time the longer 'spirit' kept the lofty religious and emotional senses, while the shortened 'sprite' drifted toward the small, mischievous fairy or elf of folklore. The old spelling 'spright' is why we still write 'sprightly', and remembering that buried gh helps explain why the family looks the way it does. In modern usage the word picked up an unrelated technical life in computing, where a sprite is a small graphic that moves about the screen.

How the word is built

• sprite (a Middle English contraction of 'spirit', from Latin spiritus: breath, spirit)