a formed impression and whatever corresponds to it: a mark, a model or pattern, an example to copy, or a foreshadowing of what is to come
The word begins with something very concrete: the mark a blow leaves behind. When Thomas demands to see "the print of the nails" in Jesus' hands, this is the word for the dent pressed into the flesh. Everything else the word means grows out of that one picture of an impression.
From the mark, the sense fans out in two directions. Looking at the thing that receives the impression, the word can name a made image or figure, such as the idols Israel carried in the desert. Looking at the thing that gives the shape, it can name the standard form of something (the wording of a letter, the mould of a body of teaching handed on) and, more strongly, the model or blueprint from which a copy is built, as with the pattern of the tabernacle that Moses was shown on the mountain.
Applied to people, the same idea becomes an example: a life held up so that others press their own conduct into its shape. Paul repeatedly calls himself and other leaders a pattern for believers to copy. Applied across time, it becomes a "type": an earlier person or event that God shapes as the pattern of a later, greater one, the way Adam stands as the pattern of the Christ who was to come. The reality that answers back to such a foreshadowing is its counterpart (ἀντίτυπος).
One idea holds all of this together: a form that stands in a corresponding relation to something else, whether as its effect, its copy, its model, or its foreshadowing. That single thread is why one Greek word can travel from a wound in the skin to the deep patterns of salvation history.