avatar

English borrowed avatar from Hindustani avtār, itself from Sanskrit avatāra, meaning the descent of a deity from heaven. The Sanskrit word joins ava ("off, away, down") with a form of the root tṝ ("to cross"), and it entered English by 1784 via William Jones's The Hindu Wife or The Enchanted Fruit.

Originally a term for a deity's descent into earthly form, the word later crossed into computing, describing a digital body representing a person — a sense first seen in 1980s video games like Habitat and Ultima IV, and later spread by Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash.

It shares its root tṝ ("to cross") with Sanskrit tāra, showing the same idea of crossing over embedded in the word's Sanskrit ancestry.