Word of the Day

: March 27, 2025

archetype

noun AHR-kih-type

What It Means

Archetype refers to someone or something that is seen to be a perfect example. It is also a word for the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies.

// The college’s most popular philosophy professor is the archetype of the preoccupied academic, complete with the messy desk, disheveled hair, and brilliant theories.

// The film is considered a sci-fi archetype for its pioneering use of special effects and prosthetics to depict an alien world.

See the entry >

archetype in Context

“One of the most notable features of folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends are their simplicity. These stories, many of them passed down to us across generations, are compelling because of the recognizable archetypes they incorporate (the evil stepmother, the dutiful daughter, the greedy king, etc.), their straightforward moral arcs, and their use of magic and transformation as catalysts for the plot.” — Gina Chung, LitHub.com, 13 Mar. 2024

Did You Know?

In her 2024 book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, author Naomi Klein writes that “the doppelganger archetype has appeared across time to explore issues of life and death, the body versus the soul, the ego versus the id …” Klein doesn’t mean that the same double, evil twin, or changeling keeps popping up throughout history, of course, but that the original concept of a doppelganger has served as a pattern, model, or template for writers to use in different ways, each supplying it with their own imagined details. Archetype’s origins are in two Greek words: the verb archein, meaning “to begin,” and the noun typos, meaning “type.” Since its debut in English in the mid-1500s, archetype has taken on uses specific to the ideas of Plato, John Locke, and Carl Jung, but in everyday prose, archetype is most commonly used to mean “a perfect example,” as in “Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is considered an archetype of doppelganger fiction.”