originatrix

English

Noun

originatrix (plural not attested)

1. A female originator.

   Synonym: originatress

   • 1854 September 16, Tom Muddie, “The Benefit Levee”, in The Quincy Patriot‎^[1]:

     Last Tuesday evening our friend Miss C., the “originatrix” of the Tableau performance, at the Town Hall, received a substantial and flattering complimentary benefit at the hands of the performers and the dear people who flocked to the hall in crowds.

   • 1862, John J[oseph] I[gnaz] Döllinger, translated by N[icholas] Darnell, The Gentile and the Jew in the Courts of the Temple of Christ: An Introduction to the History of Christianity, volume II, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, page 407:

     His fundamental thought, then, is, that voluptuousness is the origin and seat of sin; the woman its originatrix, from the pleasure she first gave and experienced in it.

   • [1862], The Handbook for Ladies’ Maids, and Guide to the Toilette, London: William Oliver & Co., […], page 58:

     For instance, the Eugenie fashion of wearing the hair is not even so becoming to the sad, pensive sweetness of the face of the empress herself, the originatrix, as to the features of many of the ladies of her court, while many, who cannot support this style of wearing the hair, have resolutely rejected it.

   • 1866 June 16, Cuthbert Bede [pen name; Edward Bradley], ““The Hero of Stilton;” and Stilton Cheese”, in “Once a Week,” an Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Popular Science, and Art, volume I, London: Bradbury, Evans, & Co., page 668, column 1:

     Probably we shall never know who was the real originator or originatrix of the luxury.

   • 1876 July, [Julia Clara Byrne], “Sainte Perine, or The City of the Gentle”, in W[alter] H[illiard] Bidwell, editor, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, volume XXIV, number 1, New York, N.Y.: E. R. Pelton, […], page 119, column 2:

     The originator, or rather originatrix, of this valuable institution was the Empress Josephine, who in 1805 devoted a fund for the purpose of subsidising a house which should provide an honorable and attractive retreat for persons of the higher class fallen into comparative poverty—pauvres honteux, as they are untranslatably termed—but principally those who had held unpensioned offices in the civil ser- vice of the country, comprising, therefore, members of the haute bourgeoisie and of the noblesse.

   • 1880, Fred[eric]k V[ictor] Dickins, “Description of Plates”, in Fugaku Hiyaku-kei or A Hundred Views of Fuji (Fusiyama), London: B. T. Batsford, […], page 11:

     This is probably Toyo-uke-bime-no mikoto (Sublime Goddess of Plenteous Food), who shares with Amaterasu no ohongami (the Great Lord Heaven-shiner) the headship over the deities of Ise, and who, by a sort of fissiparous self-division, became Kukunochi-no-kami (originatrix of trees), and Kayana-hime-no-kami (originatrix of grasses).

   • 1902 August, F. A. White, “Moral of the Late War”, in The Westminster Review, volume CLVIII, number 2, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publication Company. […], page 139:

     And is it not doubly singular—singularity upon singularity, so to speak—that we should have waged it?—that we, that for some seven centuries have been so far in the van of the progress of humanity, should now be as far in the rear, that the Mother of Freedom, with her Magna Charta, her Habeas Corpus Act, her Bill of Bights, and her well-nigh faultless Reformation, the first originatrix of the representative system of government, the first denunciatrix and repudiatrix of slavery, the first propounderess of the sublime principle of Free Trade—should now, for nearly three years, have been waging war against the world’s last, and perhaps greatest, discovery—the principle on which all Christendom, except ourselves and Russia, is fully agreed—that every civilised people, every people not wholly barbarous, every Christian Aryan people, should enjoy the incalculable blessing of self-government, which alone is perfect liberty?

   • 1907 April, “The Point of View”, in Scribner’s Magazine, volume XLI, number 4, page 507, column 2:

     Neither was Delia Bacon a German, the originatrix, if she was, of the Baconian hypothesis, of which Clarence King remarked that, the hypothesis having been established, the only remaining question was, “Who wrote Bacon?”

   • 1978, Leslie Brisman, Romantic Origins, Ithaca, N.Y., London: Cornell University Press, →ISBN, page 217:

     These sounds Darley interprets as Memnon’s yearning matin song to his mother Aurora, generative and diurnal originatrix.

   • 1992, Jerome Mandel, “Preface”, in Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, →ISBN, page 12:

     I live with three very interesting women. I want to thank them here for providing infinite hours of comic entertainment. I have singled out one of them, the originatrix of the other two and instigatrix of most of the fun, in the dedication.

   • 2009, David A. Ross, The Poetics of Philosophy [A Reading of Plato], Cambridge Scholars Publishing, →ISBN, page 212:

     This definition, relying upon innate feeling for the music, accords with Plato's divine intuition:—the divinity here the Muse, the originatrix of the music.

   • 2018, Anway Mukhopadhyay, The Goddess in Hindu-Tantric Traditions: Devi as Corpse, Routledge, →ISBN:

     The representation of Devi as the Originatrix of everything in the Mahabhagavata Upapurana, a text that highly celebrates the Kamakhya Pitha, intricately equates the aboriginal Ancestral Mother with the Mother of the Universe in Shaktism, and also with the yoni (vulva) of Sati’s corpse that gave rise to this pitha.

   • 2019, Maria E. Doerfler, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 47:

     There is also the story of Eve as originatrix of the human race and as the counterpart to the Virgin Mary, an account presented already by Tertullian’s rough contemporary, Irenaeus of Lyons.