Other forms: avatars
An avatar is the picture or figure that stands for you online — the little image on a forum, the character you move around a game.
That sense is now the dominant one in English and it is barely thirty years old. The original is religious and Hindu: an avatar is a deity coming down to earth in bodily form, and Vishnu's avatars are a central idea in Hinduism. The computing use was borrowed knowingly from that — your avatar is you descending into a world you are not physically in — which is one of the more thoughtful pieces of technical naming.
1nounavatarThe image or character representing somebody online.
“His avatar has been the same photograph for a decade.”
2nounhinduismIn Hinduism, a god appearing on earth in bodily form.
“The chapter lists the ten avatars of Vishnu.”
avatar is a representation of somebody.
Sanskrit avatara means a descent — ava, down, plus tar, to cross over. A god crossing down into the world and a user crossing down into a game are described by exactly the same word, and the second borrowing was deliberate.
Sanskrit
अवतार
English, today
avatar
Built from
From Sanskrit अवतार. inc-hnd अवतार / اوتار, from Sanskrit अवतार (“descent of a deity from a heaven”), a compound of अव (“off, away, down”) and the vṛddhi-stem of the root तॄ (“to cross”) (whence तरति). c in The Hindu Wife or The Enchanted Fruit, by William Jones. The computing sense was first attested in video games in the 1980s, such as the online roleplaying game Habitat (1985) by Lucasfilm Games (today LucasArts), later versions of the Ultima series, following religious use in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985), and the pen and paper role-playing game Shadowrun (1989). This sense was also popularized by the novel Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
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