What defines an ‘original’ thought?

From time to time, we all have what we think are original or novel thoughts, but when we do some research, we find that hundreds, if not thousands, of others, have already had and expanded on that thought. So does that mean our thought was not original?

Despite the vast amount of knowledge and information available, no one can know even a minuscule fraction of that content. A cursory search using the term “what defines original thought” returned approximately 1.2m results, so clearly, this topic itself is not original. Even within those search results, there’s no universally agreed definition, and no, I haven’t checked every single result personally. It’s just my opinion, not a fact.

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