Definition of "inception"

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.

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

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.

1913, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 4, in The Return of Tarzan‎, A. C. McClurg

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

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

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, […]

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

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.

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

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

2015, “Caged Bird”, in Revenge of the Dreamers II, performed by J. Cole ft. Omen

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

2017, “Reflection”, performed by Scarlet Pleasure

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, 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

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.

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

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

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

She spoke in a consultant's sound byte[sic] 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.

2020, Emily Segal, Mercury Retrograde, New York: Deluge Books