means To stamp or press a mark onto a surface, or, in animals and people, to fix an early, lasting attachment or memory that shapes later behavior.

from From Latin 'imprimere' — 'im-' (into) plus 'premere' (to press), the same 'premere' that gives us 'press' and 'pressure.' It came into English through Old French 'empreinter,' carrying the literal sense of pressing a die into wax or paper. The biological meaning — a duckling fixing on the first moving thing it sees — was a much later borrowing, an early-20th-century scientific stretch of that same image: experience pressed permanently into a young mind.