The Strange Roots

Avatar 🧝

Avatar can be traced back to the Sanskrit word avatāra meaning 'descent' and referred to gods who descended to earth in a human form in Hindu mythology.

Root: The word Avatar comes from the Sanskrit ava meaning 'down' and tara- meaning 'across' or 'to cross over'.

Avatar would start to be used in computing and science fiction as a term for a graphical representation of a person or character in a computer-generated environment (such as an Internet forum or game) from the 1980s.

James Cameron's 2009 film Avatar took it one step further, with humans playing the role of God and infiltrating the Na'vi, a community of 3m tall blue aliens, by porting their consciousness into hybrid-bodies or avatars.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary