Synonyms:
source, seed, germ
Meaning: anything that provides inspiration for later work
Usage examples
I am inclined to think, from my own observation of its ways, that it contains the germ of perpetual motion."
Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but, in the long run, it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright egotism.
The girl's father would have qualified this as rank treachery; and indeed Isabel knew that if Pansy should display the smallest germ of a disposition to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue.
Often while riding in the street cars I have felt a germ rubbing against my ankle like a kitten, but being a gentleman, I did not reach down and kick it away because the law says we must not be disrespectful to the dumb brutes of the field.
That adventurous spirit, Claudio Monteverde, who nearly three hundred years ago made himself responsible for the first feeble utterances of an orchestra that tried to say something for itself, divined the possibilities of expression in varying combinations of tone-quality and gave vigorous impulse to the germ of the symphony already existing in the formless instrumental preludes and interludes of his predecessors among opera-makers.