provenance

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)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.”

2. (countable, uncountable)The place and time of origin of some artifact or other object. See Usage notes below.

   “This spear is of Viking provenance.”

   “Further support for the Shansi provenance came in 1965, when a bronze quadruped with identical ornamentation and of approximately the same size as the Freer example was unearthed in tomb 126, at Fen-shui-ling, Ch'ang-chih, Shansi Province.”

3. (countable, uncountable)The history of ownership of a work of art.

   “The picture is of royal provenance.”

4. (countable, uncountable)The copy history of a piece of data, or the intermediate pieces of data used to compute a final data element, as in a database record or web site (data provenance).
5. (countable, uncountable)The execution history of computer processes which were used to compute a final piece of data (process provenance).
6. (countable, uncountable)Background; history; place of origin.

verb

1. To establish the provenance of something