source

The person, place, or thing from which something (information, goods, etc.) comes or is acquired.

Noun

  1. The person, place, or thing from which something (information, goods, etc.) comes or is acquired.
    • The accused refused to reveal the source of the illegal drugs she was selling.
    • More than a mere source of Promethean sustenance to thwart the cold and cook one's meat, wood was quite simply mankind's first industrial and manufacturing fuel. - 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion:
    • Investors face a quandary. Cash offers a return of virtually zero in many developed countries; government-bond yields may have risen in recent weeks but they are still unattractive. Equities have suffered two big bear...

    Synonyms: fund

  2. Spring; fountainhead; wellhead; any collection of water on or under the surface of the ground in which a stream originates.
    • The main sources of the Euphrates River are the Karasu and Murat Rivers.
    • The O-erh-ch'i-ssu River begins in the southern section of the lofty A-erh-t'ai Mountains of Sinkiang. This river is over 2,900 kilometers long and has a large delta area rich in minerals such as gold, iron, copper,...
    • Most of the Himalayan rivers have been relatively untouched by dams near their sources. Now the two great Asian powers, India and China, are rushing to harness them as they cut through some of the world's deepest...
  3. A reporter's informant.
  4. Source code.
  5. The name of one terminal of a field effect transistor (FET).
  6. A node in a directed graph whose edges all go out from it; one with no entering edges.
  7. The domain of a function; the object which a morphism points from.
    • Coordinate term: target

Origin

From Middle English sours, from Old French sorse (“rise, beginning, spring, source”), from sors, past participle of sordre, sourdre, from Latin surgō (“to rise”), which is composed of sub- (“up from below”) + regō (“lead, rule”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₃réǵeti (“to straighten; right”), from the root *h₃reǵ-. Doublet of surge.

Forms

sources

Synonyms

wellspring parentage

Antonyms

sink

Hyponyms

crowdsource datasource primary source secondary source source code tertiary source

Related

resource target

Derived

airmass source region backsource biosource broken source closed source closed-source crowd-source data source eigensource energy source e-source inner source InnerSource insource intersource life-source light source microsource multisource nanosource open source open-source orphan source paleosource

Verb

  1. To obtain or procure: used especially of a business resource.
    • But the point when it would have to look at alternative new-build vehicles was always looming large, and there would inevitably be a finite number of Class 66s it could source from elsewhere, and a limit to other...
  2. To find information about (a quotation)'s source (from which it comes): to find a citation for.

Forms

sources sourcing sourced

Derived

biosourced insourcing missource outsource outsourcing sourceable sourcing unsourced