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sprite

Pronunciation: /spɹaɪt/

The English word “sprite” has 9 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A spirit; a soul; a shade.
  2. An apparition; a ghost.
  3. An elf, fairy, or goblin; one with a small humanlike physical body.
  4. A two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene.
  5. A large electrical discharge that occurs high above the cumulonimbus cloud of an active thunderstorm, which appears as a luminous red or orange flash.
  6. The green woodpecker, or yaffle (Picus viridis).
  7. Any of various African damselflies of the genus Pseudagrion (of which, Australian species are named riverdamsels).
  8. A spayed female ferret.

verb

  1. To draw a (specifically) pixel art sprite.

Etymology

From Middle English sprite, spryt, spreyte, from Old French esprit (“spirit”), from Latin spīritus. Doublet of spirit, spiritus, spirytus, spright, and esprit. (computer graphics): First used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s. (meteorology): An acronym for Stratospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.