Planting CSS Sprites

Spriting is a term that many web developers and designers have come to know over the past couple of years. But what are sprites, what are they used for and what exactly is their purpose? The word sprite has many meanings, the word sprite originated from fairy tales and was later adopted by game developers. Spriting was a technique game programmers used to make use of one graphical image and only show it in sections inside a screen. Think of 8-bit Video Games, they had their limits, game programmers had to decrease processing by use of sprites, to request one image took less resources then it took to request anything more than one, this made for smoother game play and happier customers.