1. a very typical example of a certain person or thing: "the book is a perfect archetype of the genre"
▪ an original that has been imitated: "the archetype of faith is Abraham"
▪ a recurrent symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology: "mythological archetypes of good and evil"
▪ (in Jungian psychology) a primitive mental image inherited from the earliest human ancestors, and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious.
Word Originmid 16th century: via Latin from Greek arkhetupon ‘something moulded first as a model’, from arkhe- ‘primitive’ + tupos ‘a model’.