Why Do We Say "Sprites"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTqfeJ2yJwE&t=100s

The word "Sprite" originally referred to fairies or spirits.  Within games, a sprite is a 2D object that can move independently from the background.   Your mouse cursor is a sprite.

It was obvious to me that "Space Invaders" did not have hardware sprites, because it moved the invaders one at a time instead of moving them all at once.  This led to a reportedly unintentional bug that became a feature;  as invaders were eliminated, the remaining invaders moved faster because there were fewer objects to move.

Two computers that I wrote games for in the 1980s did not have hardware sprites.  This puts the game at a disadvantage because the code has to draw objects to the screen, which is technically difficult and burdens the CPU.  This limits what an 8-bit computer without hardware sprites can do.  

I wrote software to emulate hardware sprites on the Atari ST.  Since it was a 16-bit computer, the extra computer power made this task easier.  Once computers and game systems reached 32-bit, they usually didn't bother to include hardware sprites because the processors were powerful enough to draw anything they wanted to the screen.