How do you call the entity that will have duplicates assigned to?

Question

I'm looking for the best word to use describing the entity that will have a duplicate or duplicates associated with, the one that will remain, say, during a merging process, while the duplicate of it will be removed (be archived / hidden... etc).

Here are the possibilities:

1. Master - I saw / heard this one being used the most, someone told me it's sexist / politically incorrect as it is referring to a male
2. Main - Not sure if it's the best for my use-case, but might be another good choice in my eyes
3. Original - Although this one assumes the creator of the duplicate was aware of the existence of the "Original"...?
4. Parent - I don't think of this as a parent child relationship, it's more like twins, then again someone told me twins "are born at the same time"

EDIT: I'm not looking for an academic's answer, I'm looking for a best practice in an app, eg. what would users of an app react the best to / feel being the most intuitive to use / see the easiest to understand / think of it as the most accurate description of the function / feature they're are looking for when they're associating / merging duplicates.

Answer 1

I would use master - if you look at one of the meanings of the word, it seems to cover your situation.

Also called matrix. an original document, drawing, manuscript, etc., from which copies are made. Source

This word is also often used in computer science. As for the sexist part - initially I didn't want to comment on this but I decided to - in the system you're referring to an object and not a person, so how can it be sexist? Also, the meaning above (the one you need) is not a meaning of the word mistress and it would be extremely confusing to use it in this context.

Answer 2

Probably not quite what you need, but something that might apply nevertheless would be baseline (if the master/original has the role of an authoritative source of truth instead of being accidentally the first issue created).