Archetypal

//ˈɑːkɪtaɪpəl// adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of or pertaining to an archetype.

    "In 1928 [Martin] Heidegger succeeded [Edmund] Husserl to take a chair at Freiburg and in his inaugural lecture made a pronouncement that earned him a reputation as an archetypal metaphysician with his claim that our awareness of people as a whole depends on our experience of dread in the face of nothingness."

Adjective
  1. 1
    representing or constituting an original type after which other similar things are patterned wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
archetypicalarchetypicarchetypicarchetypicalarchetypicalclassic

Example

More examples

"Ziri is your archetypal hillbilly."

Etymology

From archetype + -al.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.