Origins
An origin is a sunrise. The word comes from Latin orīgō, meaning 'a rising, a beginning, a source', from the verb orīrī — 'to rise, to become visible'. The Proto-Indo-European root *h₃er- meant 'to move' or 'to rise', and the metaphor embedded in origin is the dawn: the moment something rises above the horizon and becomes visible.
The same root produced orient, from Latin oriēns — 'the rising one'. The Orient is the east because that is where the sun rises. To orient yourself is to face east, to find the sunrise and determine where you are. Before compasses, the rising sun was the primary reference point for navigation.
Original preserves a different shade. In medieval usage, original sin was the sin at the origin — the first one, from which all others rose. An original document is the one from which copies descend. Originality means being the source rather than the copy.
Latin Roots
Abort belongs to this family through a grimmer connection. Latin abortus combines ab- ('away from') with ortus ('a rising, a birth'). To abort is to fail to rise — a beginning that does not complete.
Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) placed the word at the centre of modern thought. His title promised to explain not just where species are, but where they rose from — their orīgō. For a site devoted to word origins, this etymology is particularly fitting: every entry here traces a linguistic sunrise.