Origin

1. n. The point of attachment or end of a muscle which is fixed during contraction; — in contradistinction to insertion.
2. n. The first existence or beginning of anything; the birth.
3. n. That from which anything primarily proceeds; the fountain; the spring; the cause; the occasion.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.