ἀρχέτυπον

ἀρχέτυπον (archetupon, "ar-KHEH-too-pon") — the "original," the first-struck pattern of which all else is copy — lives, in this record, almost entirely inside one mind. There are 27 occurrences across just 2 works, and the count is lopsided to the point of being a portrait: Plotinus's Enneads holds 26 of them; Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers holds the remaining 1. This is not a word spread across the Greek corpus; it is a word the Neoplatonist reached for again and again and that the doxographer noted once in passing.

Where the word actually lives is the Enneads, scattered through the whole treatise. The concordance carries it from 1.2 through 5.3 (stable ids `plotinus:enneads:1.2:s111` through `plotinus:enneads:5.3:s3841`), turning up mostly in the singular ἀρχέτυπον but also in the plural — as the nominative ἀρχέτυπα, "originals," at 2.6, and again as the genitive plural ἀρχετύπων, "of the originals," at 5.1 — and in the genitive singular ἀρχετύπου, "of the original," at 4.3. The later books cluster densest: three attestations in 5.3 alone.

The record is honest about its own thinness here. It carries no lexicon entry for this lemma — no dated authority is attached — so no gloss is borrowed from outside the record. And there is no etymology pointer matched: the honest gap is that the record carries no cognate or root claim for this word, and none is imported as though a dictionary had spoken. What the passages themselves say is only this — that a Greek thinker returned, dozens of times, to the idea of a first pattern.

In this attestation set ἀρχέτυπον is less a common noun of the language than a working term of one philosophy — the name for the model behind the visible, used by the man most concerned to argue that such a model exists.

When a word is spoken almost only by one thinker, is it the language's word, or his?