Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Primitive; original.
  • Productive; causing existence.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective rare Causing existence; productive.
  • adjective rare Primitive; primary; original.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective rare Of, pertaining to or causing the origin of something
  • adjective rare primitive, original

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Such a repression, then, can with good reason be called 'originary'.

    enowning enowning 2008

  • Such a repression, then, can with good reason be called 'originary'.

    Archive 2008-03-01 enowning 2008

  • The deconstructive approach to literature was marked by a number of signature traits: an aloofness from cause-effect relations, "originary" historical factors, and determinate "intended meanings"; a denial that literature is "about" anything besides reading and writing; a concentration on destabilizing, infinitely regressive linguistic effects; a ponderous coyness about the critic's own immersion in the swirling current of interpretation; a blurring of the line between a given author's metaphors and the critic's own; a dense opacity of style, whereby vague abstractions conjoined to perform a slowly circling Dance of the Elephants; and explicit obeisance to certain prized authorities such as Derrida, Lacan, and de Man, along with the forefathers Nietzsche and Heidegger.

    'Kafka Up Close': An Exchange Corngold, Stanley 2005

  • a kind of originary explosion that simultaneously produces matter as passively receptive to form and keeps any form, even the quasi-eternal "heaven of heavens," from being truly eternal and unchanging (since the "heaven of heavens" has, after all, undergone the greatest change of all: that from non-existence to existence).

    An und für sich Adam Kotsko 2010

  • ORIGIN "The Metaphysical and Theological idea of an" originary "presence is so deeply flawed.

    Recently Uploaded Slideshows jirwin66 2009

  • But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything?

    atlas(t) clairelight 2009

  • This current fotty-relatedmadness is just the inversion of a more originary lunacy.

    Managers believe strikers are worth their weight in gold, I'm not so sure | David James 2011

  • For the text's reversion to the beginnings of the world also puts under erasure its own originary moment: the moment of the dawn of transcendental idealism as a shape all light that later becomes the philosophy of revelation.

    'The Abyss of the Past': Psychoanalysis in Schelling's Ages of the World (1815) 2008

  • By premising its concept of "world" (or an all-encompassing framework by some other name) on an originary act of reflexive self-possession, Cartesian epistemology and the political philosophy of classical liberalism revolve a model of agency constituted ex negativo — that is, defined by the alleged absence of any inner pre-determination.

    The Melancholic Gift: Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy and Fiction 2008

  • His text is the most sacred, the most poetic, the most originary, since he creates a name and gives it to himself, but he is left no less destitute in his force and even in his wealth; he pleads for a translator.

    Archive 2008-07-01 Mary Kate Hurley 2008

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