Sprite
name, noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Any of various supernatural beings, loosely defined:; A spirit; a soul; a shade.
"He who torments the chafer's sprite Weaves a bower in endless night."
- 2 a small being, human in form, playful and having magical powers wordnet
- 3 Any of various supernatural beings, loosely defined:; An apparition; a ghost.
- 4 Any of various supernatural beings, loosely defined:; An elf, fairy, or goblin; one with a small humanlike physical body.
- 5 A two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene.
Show 5 more definitions
- 6 A large electrical discharge that occurs high above the cumulonimbus cloud of an active thunderstorm, which appears as a luminous red or orange flash.
- 7 The green woodpecker, or yaffle (Picus viridis).
- 8 Any of various African damselflies of the genus Pseudagrion (of which, Australian species are named riverdamsels).
- 9 A spayed female ferret.
- 10 Alternative form of spright (“frame of mind, disposition”). alt-of, alternative, obsolete
- 1 To draw a (specifically) pixel art sprite. informal
"sprited the new NPCs"
- 1 A colourless, caffeine-free, lemon and lime-flavoured soft drink.
Example
More examples"I am a little world made cunningly of elements, and an angelic 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.
In the early 1940s, Coca-Cola started running an advertising campaign featuring an elf-like figure called “Sprite Boy” (see sprite (“elf”)). The name originated from the previous Coca-Cola campaign, but it was a focus group that ultimately chose the name “Sprite”.
Related phrases
More for "sprite"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.