avatar
/ˈæv.ə.tɑɹ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.69 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An incarnation of a deity, particularly Vishnu.
noun
A representation within a dimension of an entity that exists outside of that dimension.
noun
A representation within a dimension of an entity that exists outside of that dimension.
noun
A representation within a dimension of an entity that exists outside of that dimension.
noun
A representation within a dimension of an entity that exists outside of that dimension.
noun
A representation within a dimension of an entity that exists outside of that dimension.
name
A male given name from Sanskrit used in India.
Example Sentences
- "Fish, Boar, Snake, Lion [footnote] The four first Avatars, or Incarnations of the Divine Spirit."
- "Last year, a 14-year-old boy died by suicide after falling in love with a chatbot from Character.AI. The last thing he did was have a conversation with an AI avatar that, possibly failing to recognize the severity of the situation, reportedly encouraged him to go through with his plan to “join her”."
- "Devices now track and record our every move and, whether we like it or not, each one of us will bequeath to posterity a virtual avatar, a digital being whose calls, messages, transactions, loves and losses will live on in a vast, unregulated cyberspace. The afterlife has arrived, at least for our cyberbeings."
- "...that a new avatar of Mrs. Siddons has appeared at Covent Garden, in the shape of her niece Fanny Kemble..."
- "And honest Alan, who was a grim fire-eater in his day, has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention from his Ovid, […]"
- "The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂ew Proto-Indo-Iranian *Háwa Sanskrit अव (ava) Proto-Indo-European *terh₂- Sanskrit तॄ (tṝ) Sanskrit तार (tāra) Sanskrit अवतार (avatāra)der. English avatar Borrowed from Hindustani अवतार (avtār) / اوتار (avtār), from Sanskrit अवतार (avatāra, “descent of a deity from a heaven”), a compound of अव (ava, “off, away, down”) and the vṛddhi-stem of the root तॄ (tṝ, “to cross”) (whence तरति (tarati)). First attested in c. 1784 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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: अवतार
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈæv.ə.tɑɹ/
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
brand avatar
avatar on Wikiquote