avatar
Pluralavatars
- 1A simple, static digital image that represents a person online, often used as a profile token outside virtual worlds.
He changed his avatar to a plain black square in protest.
Most users on the board keep the same avatar for years.
Similaricon
Note
Outside virtual worlds the word shrinks to a token: a small, still or nearly still image beside a name in a forum, chat or comment thread. The verbs follow the scale. Users pick, change or keep an avatar rather than steer it. The image need not resemble its owner at all, since a plain square can serve. Where the animated virtual body acts for a person, this one simply marks them.
- 2A complex, animated digital model that represents a person in a virtual world, online chat room, or metaverse, controlled as that person's online alter ego.
He spent hours customizing his avatar before entering the virtual chat room.
Players guide their avatars through sprawling three-dimensional worlds.
Similarcharacter
Note
Gaming and virtual worlds use the word for a body, not a picture. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) calls avatars "the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse," and that remains the test: this avatar moves, speaks and acts in a shared space. The word now stretches to AI characters people converse with. Keep it apart from the small profile image, which stands for a user rather than embodying one.
- 3An incarnation of a deity in bodily form, particularly one of the god Vishnu.
Rama is revered as an avatar of Vishnu who came to defeat a demon king.
Devotees celebrate the descent of each avatar with festivals and prayers.
Similarincarnation, manifestation
Note
The religious sense, and the oldest one. English took it from Hindustani avtār, from Sanskrit avatāra, "descent of a deity from a heaven," which joins ava, "down," to a root meaning "to cross." William Jones uses it c. 1784 in The Hindu Wife; or, The Enchanted Fruit. The picture is of a god crossing down into the world. That is why one speaks of an avatar of Vishnu, with of naming the deity who descends.
- 4The embodiment of an idea or concept; a person or thing in which an abstract idea takes concrete or personified form.
The general became the avatar of national resistance during the war.
Critics called the novel's hero an avatar of pure ambition.
Similarembodiment, personification, epitome, incarnation
Note
Nineteenth-century writers carried the word out of theology and into criticism. Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Romance and Reality (1831) hails Fanny Kemble as "a new avatar of Mrs. Siddons." Stevenson's dedication to Kidnapped (1886) gives Alan a "new avatar" in fiction. The favored frame is new avatar of someone: one figure reappearing in another. It works as a secular echo of the divine incarnation, with a person or ideal in place of the god.
Practice
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Origin
First used around 1784, it was borrowed from Hindustani avtār, from Sanskrit avatāra, meaning the "descent of a deity from a heaven": a compound of ava ("off, away, down") and a form of the root tṝ ("to cross"). The computing sense grew out of 1980s video games such as Habitat (1985) and the Ultima series, and was later popularized by Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash (1992).