- a document, work of art, etc. produced for the first time, from which copies are later made
- This painting is a copy; the original is in Madrid.
- Send out the photocopies and keep the original.
- At that price, you could have bought an original!
- He copied paintings of famous artists and passed them off as originals.
- Can you think of a movie remake that was better than the original?
- The film stays romantically faithful to the 1963 original.
- Most items in the collection are exact copies of the originals.
Oxford Collocations Dictionaryverb + original- pass something off as
- in the original
Definitions on the go
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- (formal) a person who thinks, behaves, dresses, etc. in an unusual way
- Mark Twain was a true original who possibly did more for American literature than any other writer.
Word OriginMiddle English (the earliest use being in the phrase original sin): from Old French, or from Latin originalis, from origin-, from oriri ‘to rise’.
Idioms
See original in the Oxford Advanced American DictionarySee original in the Oxford Learner's Dictionary of Academic Englishin the original
- in the language in which a book, etc. was first written, before being translated
- I studied Italian so that I would be able to read Dante in the original.
- to read Tolstoy in the original
Check pronunciation:
original