archetype

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun An original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype.
• noun An ideal example of a type; quintessence.
• noun In Jungian psychology, an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun A model or first form; the original pattern or model after which a thing is made; especially, a Platonic idea, or immaterial preëxisting exemplar of a natural form.
• noun In coining, the standard weight by which others are adjusted: now called the prototype.
• noun In comparative anatomy, a primitive generalized plan of structure assumed to have been subsequently modified or lost by differentiation and specialization: as, the vertebrate archetype.
• noun The original form from which a class of related forms in plants or animals may be supposed to have descended.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun The original pattern or model of a work; or the model from which a thing is made or formed.
• noun (Coinage) The standard weight or coin by which others are adjusted.
• noun (Biol.) The plan or fundamental structure on which a natural group of animals or plants or their systems of organs are assumed to have been constructed.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun An original model of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are merely derivative, copied, patterned, or emulated; a prototype
• noun literature A character, story, or object that is based on a known character, story, or object.
• noun An ideal example of something; a quintessence.
• noun psychology According to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, a universal pattern of thought, present in an individual's unconscious, inherited from the past collective experience of humanity.
• verb To depict as, model using or otherwise associate a subject or object with an archetype.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun something that serves as a model or a basis for making copies