The act of doing that which begins anything; commencement of an action, state, or space of time; entrance into being or upon a course; the first act, effort, or state of a succession of acts or states.
The initial portion of some extended thing.
That which is begun; a rudiment or element.
That which begins or originates something; the source or first cause.
Of or relating to the first portion of some extended thing.
Meaning as derived and conveyed thereby: The literal meaning of a term according to its origin, which may differ from its usual meaning when the latter relies on idiomatic conventions that are not conveyed by the term alone (that is, they must be known in other ways, such as experience, training, education, or dictionary lookup).
The original or earlier form of an inherited or borrowed word, affix, or morpheme either from an earlier period in a language's development, from an ancestral language, or from a foreign language.