Late Middle English, borrowed from Latin inceptiō, from inceptus, perfect passive participle of incipiō (“I begin”).

The layering sense derives from the 2010 science fiction film Inception, in which a team of people infiltrate someone’s subconscious mind, proceeding through several layers of dreams with the goal of causing someone to incept an idea.

• IPA^(key): /ɪnˈsɛpʃən/

• Audio (US):

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• Audio (General Australian):

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• Rhymes: -ɛpʃən
• Hyphenation: in‧cep‧tion

inception (countable and uncountable, plural inceptions)

1. The creation or beginning of something; the establishment.

   From its inception, the agency has been helping people obtain and properly install car seats for children.

   • 1851 June – 1852 April, Harriet Beecher Stowe, chapter XLV, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), Boston, Mass.: John P Jewett & Company; Cleveland, Oh.: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, published 20 March 1852, →OCLC:

     To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises.

   • 1913 June–December, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 4, in The Return of Tarzan, New York, N.Y.: A C McClurg, published March 1915, →OCLC:

     For a few moments they spoke of the opera, of the topics that were then occupying the attention of Paris, of the pleasure of renewing their brief acquaintance which had had its inception under such odd circumstances, and this brought them to the subject that was uppermost in the minds of both.

   • 1915, Jack London, chapter 18, in The Star Rover‎:

     My mother, at my inception, did not create that passionate lack of fear that is mine.

   • 1979 May, The Interagency Committee on New Therapies for Pain and Discomfort Report to the White House, Department of Health , page 128:

     Utilizing a case register in Salford, England, Stein and Susser have studied inceptions of psychiatric illness Inceptions, defined as first episode of psychiatric care in a person's life,

   • 2021 June 30, David Clough, “Brush: a UK rail icon”, in RAIL, number 934, page 55:

     Concurrent to this order, Good forged a link with Irish Railways, which resulted in the latter building five shunters with Brush equipment, marking the inception of dieselisation in the country.

2. A layering, nesting, or recursion of something within itself.
   • 2015, “Caged Bird”, in Revenge of the Dreamers II, performed by J. Cole ft. Omen:

     Well it's the… Mr. Introspective / I'm a dreamer's dream, a sort of an inception

   • 2017, “Reflection”, performed by Scarlet Pleasure:

     I look at you, I see my reflection / Three levels deep, this is inception

   • 2019, Gary Grant et al., “Explorations in Mixed Reality with Learning and Teaching Frameworks: Lessons from Ludus and the Vulcan Academy”, in Vladimir Geroimenko, editor, Augmented Reality Games II: The Gamification of Education, Medicine and Art, page 117:

     With the recent uptake of mixed-reality (MR) technology, this frame can be redefined, allowing for virtual simulations to exist within the physical frame, effectively delivering an inception of physical and simulated interfaces.

   • 2019, L.D. Crichton, All Our Broken Pieces:

     Tonight we've just had a lengthy discussion about the likelihood of dreams being a portal to some external, alternate reality. All signs point to yes. They could be. Inceptions of inceptions and so forth.

   • 2020, Farra A., What's Fate Got to Do With It?:

     He was sketching me as I doodled in my own book, almost like an inception.

   • 2020, Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde, New York: Deluge Books, →ISBN:

     She spoke in a consultant's sound byte fashion, which translates text into your head holistically, calmly, slowly, and full of quotations. It was a high fidelity conversation—a kind of local and consensual inception. I knew whom Piet had been fucking.

• conception

• incept
• inceptive
• inceptual
• incipient

• from the get-go