Urtext

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An original manuscript that serves as the source document for derivative works or adaptations in literature and other fields
2. The earliest version of a work considered authentic and used as a basis for later copies or adaptations
3. A primary source text regarded as the definitive original before any changes or edits

Etymology: The German prefix "ur-" does much of the work in "urtext," a word that means "original source text," especially of a manuscript, score, or document from which later versions are copied or translated. The prefix means "original" or "primitive," as in German "Urknall" (the Big Bang), and English borrowed it to build a term for the earliest form of a text. Its usage in English is largely a product of scholarship in the 19th and 20th centuries, when editors and musicologists needed a precise way to refer to a lost or hypothetical original. The second half, "text," goes back much further. It traces through Middle English and Old French to New Latin "textus," meaning "a tissue" or "a literary work," and ultimately to the Latin verb "texere," "to weave." That is why a text is literally something woven: the Latin word for a piece of cloth and the Latin word for a written passage were the same idea, the threads of language joined into a whole.