I’ve been using Aseprite for years, and still wondering the meaning behind the name. I was thinking this should be in the FAQ on the site.
When I first saw the name, I read “Ae-sprite”, but then I noticed the word “sprite” is broken up by an awkward E between the S and P. So I worked on getting my head around that ever since. I pronounce it “A-seh-prite”, like a 3 syllable word. That’s not a normal English word pattern, and so I’m curious - I have my suspicions that the name doesn’t have its roots in English, or at least, someone who doesn’t speak English as a first language!
Actually the “ASE” prefix came from “Allegro Sprite Editor,” the old name of Aseprite. Then I renamed to an easily googleable term (a word with 0 results on Google), and aseprite.org domain was available, so “Aseprite” was a great candidate for the new name of the program (+ keeping the old name as a prefix).
P.S. Allegro was a game development library used to program ASE from the very beginning (this year Allegro was finally removed from the Linux port, and now we use our own code to handle windows and mouse/keyboard input).
Personally I think that’s interesting enough to have it’s own entry in the FAQ! Good thinking to come up with something that doesn’t have any other matches on Google. And I remember reading about Allegro back in the DOS days. It makes me curious about how old Aseprite is.