Let's distinguish between a few vocabulary words in Git and discuss a common workflow that involves forking.
As in the picture below, all of our work generally starts from one parent repository. We call this the parent repository, but we can sometimes call it different things depending on how we work with it.
For example, when we clone a repository by creating a local copy on our machine, we refer to that original remote repository as origin.
When we create branches, we can create them on our local clone and on the remote origin.
Things start to get tricky when we start talking about forking. A fork is a remote copy of a repository with a different owner. When you have a new remote fork, you would refer to the parent remote as upstream.
If you cloned the fork, you would refer to your own fork as origin, and the parent as upstream.
When you want to return work back to the origin or upstream repositories, you would push back to origin, then open a pull request between the remote forks.
