Question: The *New York Times* article of this past July 29th titled, “The D.O. Is In Now:
Osteopathic Schools Turn Out Nearly a Third of All Med School Grads,” features the growing popularity of the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem, Manhattan among would-be doctors, and introduces the following episode:

> 
> “Gabrielle Rozenberg, in her second year at Touro, remembers the
>  **Ur-moment** that would lead her to this somewhat unconventional path in
>  medicine. Growing up on Long Island, she suffered from chronic ear
>  infections. Her doctor recommended surgery. But before committing to
>  an invasive procedure, her parents took her to a D.O. In several
>  visits, he performed some twists and turns of her neck and head, and
>  within days the infection cleared up.”
>    
>        ― *New York Times*, [“The osteopathic branch of medicine is booming”](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/education/edlife/the-osteopathic-branch-of-medicine-is-booming.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0), 29 July 2014
> 
> 
> 

I surmise “Ur-moment” means a decisive or eureka moment in retrospect. But I don’t find this word in any English dictionaries at hand. 

Is “Ur-moment” a normal English expression? Isn’t it “Ah! (or something else)-moment”?

Answer: 
***Ur*** in this case refers to *the first*, so Ur-moment means *the first moment*.

This meaning stems from the German [ur-](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur-), meaning *proto*, or *original*.

Apart from being bit of a fancy way of saying "the first", it is often used to distinguish from a series of like events, the Ur- being the very first of the series. Alternately it refers to the first during a time where the subject is still in a primal form. For example, [***urlanguage***](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urlanguage) is synonymous with [**proto-language**](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proto-language#English), an ancestral language whose form greatly differs from its modern decendants. TVTropes also uses the concept of [***Ur Example***](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrExample) to refer to the first instance that a certain trope appeared, which is somewhat different from the [***Trope Maker***](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeMakers), where the form of the trope is unambiguous.

Incidentally, there is a bit of a misconception that it comes from the ancient Sumerian city of [Ur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur), well known as one of the most ancient cities in the world. This seems to be a coincidence.
The Old Testament city of Ur was a toponym, a place-name. In the story, the character Abraham, himself an originator of the monotheism practice of his tribe upon which the saga is centered, is said himself to originate from the city of Ur. 

So, the common understanding of the the usage of an "Ur-moment" would more than likely be a reference to an "origination of an originating event in one place and at time". The capitalization of the phrase adds even more credence to the theory that the source of the usage is from the Old Testament story meme.