sprite

Sprite comes from Middle English sprite (also spelled spryt or spreyte), from Old French esprit meaning 'spirit,' which traces back to Latin spīritus. It's a doublet of spirit itself — two English words descended from the same Latin root.

Beyond its old sense of a ghostly or fairy-like being, the word picked up two very different modern lives: in computer graphics, it was first used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s for a movable image; in meteorology, it became an acronym — Stratospheric Perturbations Resulting from Intense Thunderstorm Electrification — for a flash of light above thunderstorms.

Sprite is a doublet of spirit and esprit, all three words descending from the same Latin ancestor, spīritus.