We propose an approach to automatically test for originality in generation tasks where no standard automatic measures exist. Our proposal addresses original uses of language, not necessarily original ideas. We provide an algorithm for our approach and a run-time analysis. The algorithm, which finds all of the original fragments in a ground-truth corpus and can reveal whether a generated fragment copies an original without attribution, has a run-time complexity of theta(nlogn) where n is the number of sentences in the ground truth.