provenance

Etymology

Borrowed from French provenance (“origin”), from Middle French provenant, present participle of provenir (“come forth, arise”), from Latin provenio (“to come forth”).

noun

1. Place or source of origin.
   Many supermarkets display the provenance of their food products.
   Within this melee of intersections between English and Cantonese, the students, being themselves bilingually fluent, were able to navigate with perfect ease in communicative contexts where the provenance of a certain term or expression matters little. 2015, James Lambert, “Lexicography as a teaching tool: A Hong Kong case study”, in Lan Li, Jamie McKeown, Liming Liu, editors, Dictionaries and corpora: Innovations in reference science. Proceedings of ASIALEX 2015 Hong Kong, Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, page 147
2. (archaeology) The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage note below.
   This spear is of Viking provenance.
3. (art) The history of ownership of a work of art
   The picture is of royal provenance.
4. (computing) The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data utilized to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance)
5. (computing) The execution history of computer processes which were utilized to compute a final piece of data (process provenance)
6. (of a person) Background; history; place of origin

verb

1. To establish the provenance of something