I first did this word more than 4 years ago and at the time it wasn’t all that popular a word.

Sponsor: Hold your meetings online for just $49 a month Try GoToMeeting free.

I had first come across it when beginning to post in web forums where you can often sign in and have a little image show up beside your post.  This image is called the avatar.

According to the PC Magazine Encyclopedia it’s an image meant to represent you to others and evolved out of online gaming.

It is supposed to be a caricature or a bizarre fantasy figure, not a real picture of you.

This goes to show that I got it wrong—again—since I put a real picture of myself.

PC Magazine goes on to explain that the word comes from Sanskrit and means “the incarnation of a god on earth.”

Whoa, I really got it wrong.

Anyway, the OED agrees with the etymology of avatar further explaining that it means the descent of the god to earth and breaks into two parts; ava meaning “down” and tar meaning “to pass over.”

Although this is all very interesting, the reason I originally did this word is because of the guy who introduced it to English in 1784.

That was William Jones.

If you’ve been following podictionary for a while you’ll know that William Jones is considered the father of the theory of Indo-European languages.

As a child he was very poor but still managed to graduate from Oxford and study law as well as learn to speak a whole pile of different languages. He became pretty well connected and after the American revolution he even tried his hand at bringing the US back into the British Empire.

That didn’t work out but Jones kept plugging away at his legal career with eventually landed him a seat on the Supreme Court of Bengal, then a part of the British Empire.

So there he was in India, with his keen interest in classical civilizations and languages, and what does he notice but that there are a whole bunch of Sanskrit words that are just too similar to words from Greek and Latin and other languages too, to simply be coincidence.

Could it be, he wondered, that there was some precursor language that spread and grew to take over territory all the way from India to Europe?

The idea had occurred more than 100 years earlier to a Dutch guy named von Boxhorn but no one noticed his ideas at the time.  It was the much more prominent Jones—who was eventually knighted—riding the wave of Britain’s then superpower status that kicked off our understanding of how so many languages are related.