These words refer to the representative, ideal or earliest form of something. Prototype indicates the first example of a type from which other examples are developed or on which they are modelled: the anthropoid prototype of modern man; The Homeric epics became the prototypes upon which Virgil, Milton and other based their epic poems. The word can indicate also the first full-scale model of something: the prototype of his plan for urban housing projects, built to demonstrate its advantages.

Pattern can apply to the plans for a product rather than to the prototype or the later creations made from its specifications; often, it suggests blueprints or templates to be followed in constructing the product: new dress patterns on sale. More generally, the word indicates the design or configuration that something takes in actuality: the pattern of imagery in Hamlet that pertains to bodily injury and disease; patterns of culture. But the word can refer also to the perfect representative of a type, or to any example thought worthy of emulation: Castiglione was the very pattern of the Renaissance courtier.

Original is close to prototype in distinguishing the first or genuine product from copies or later versions: She typed an original and two carbons; a painting that proved to be copied from an original in the Louvre; a close comparison of the two dresses, one a signed original , the other a mass-produced copy; a collation of all manuscript copies with the original . Urtext , the most restricted of these words, is adopted from the German and refers to the earliest version of a literary work, whether written or printed and whether extant or not: an argument that presupposed a vanished Urtext of the play upon which the existing version is modelled.

Archetype also refer to the earliest version of a literary work; in this case, it refers strictly to a manuscript that no longer exists: possible to reconstruct the archetype from the variety of incomplete copies in existence. Archetype refers much more widely to the abstract conception of a perfect type. In Platonism, archetypes are the general or pure forms of which existing things are imperfect copies: for Plato, all chairs, however varying in design, can be said to reflect in their "chair-ness" the same archetype , just as there are archetypes for justice, goodness and such institutions as a republic. A modern redefinition of archetype was initiated by Jung to refer to those forms and symbols in the unconscious of all men that theoretically reflect the past history of the species: a myth that deals with archetypes of guilt, death, redemption and rebirth. More loosely, the word can refer to the quintessential elements that something contains: recurrent archetypes of conflict and resolution that can be seen in the living patterns of every family unit. Prototype and archetype are sometimes loosely substituted for each other, but, strictly speaking, prototype suggests an early, possibly unrefined version that later versions may reflect but depart from; archetype , by contrast, suggests a perfect and unchanging form, real or imaginary, that existing things can more or less approach, but never equal. Ideal is a much simpler word for some of the meanings indicated by archetype . Sometimes it means simply "the best possible": it was ideal weather for tennis. But it usually suggests an imagined perfection, formulated as a goal to strive for or as a measure against which to test something that exists: describing his ideal of what a city should be like and comparing this to the actual monstrosities that the trend to urbanization has produced. As can be seen, ideal may indicate a personal rather than universal set of desirable qualities, whereas archetype refers to what is generally and invariably true of all examples, at least in essence. Ideal can also point hyperbolically to an instance seen as an embodiment of perfection: He was her ideal of all that was manly. Exemplar concentrates exclusively on this last possibility of ideal , pointing to an instance that seems the perfect realization of its type: a soprano who was the exemplar of the prima donna at her most grandiose and temperamental.