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.
No, the prefix "ur-" is not a common construction in English, as demonstrated by the quoted writer mis-using it and their editor not noticing. As [tchrist's dictionary quotes explain](https://english.stackexchange.com/a/187750/63503), the "ur-X" is the original X. The common example is the play *Hamlet*. There seems to have been a play about a character called Hamlet floating around for about a decade before Shakespeare wrote his play. This original play is referred to the "ur-Hamlet". The prefix is also used in linguistics, philosophy and mathematical logic and set-theory.

But the writer quoted in the question talks about an "ur-moment": an original moment. The ur-moment would either be the birth of the universe or perhaps the birth or conception of the person who had the ur-moment. The moment of realising that manipulating her neck could allegedly cure ear infections is not an ur-moment but a *eureka moment* (as mentioned in the question).