1. The letter s
2. Something resembling the letter S in shape; especially; an S-shaped curve in a road

City and port W Morocco on the Atlantic W of Marrakech.

Land essarted; action of assarting.

Assart, make arable by clearing trees, etc.

ETYM French essai, from Latin exagium a weighing, weight, balance.
1. A tentative attempt.
2. An analytic or interpretive literary composition.
Short piece of nonfiction, often dealing with a particular subject from a personal point of view. The essay became a recognized genre with French writer Montaigne’s Essais 1580 and in English with Francis Bacon’s Essays 1597. Today the essay is a part of journalism: articles in the broadsheet newspapers are in the essay tradition.
Abraham Cowley, whose essays appeared 1668, brought a greater ease and freedom to the genre than it had possessed before in England, but it was with the development of periodical literature in the 18th century that the essay became a widely used form. The great names are Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, with their Tatler and Spectator papers, and later Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. In North America the politician and scientist Benjamin Franklin was noted for his style.
A new era was inaugurated by Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia 1820; to the same period belong Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey in England, C A Sainte-Beuve in France, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau in the US. From the 19th century the essay was increasingly used in Europe and the US as a vehicle for literary criticism. Hazlitt may be regarded as the originator of the critical essay, and his successors include Matthew Arnold and Edmund Gosse. Thomas Macaulay, whose essays began to appear shortly after those of Lamb, presents a strong contrast to Lamb with his vigorous but less personal tone.
There was a revival of the form during the closing years of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, in the work of R L Stevenson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Anatole France, Théophile Gautier, and Max Beerbohm. The literary journalistic tradition of the essay was continued by James Thurber, Mark Twain, H L Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Desmond MacCarthy, and others, and the critical essay by George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, F R Leavis, T S Eliot, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and others.

1. To put to a test
2. To make an often tentative or experimental effort to perform; try

An examination question that requires an answer in a sentence, paragraph, or short composition.

A writer of literary works; SYN. litterateur.

1. Of or relating to an essay or an essayist
2. Resembling an essay in quality or character

(Latin) To be rather than to seem — motto of North Carolina.

1. A member of a North American Indian people living on the California coast near Monterey.
2. The Hokan language spoken by the Esselen people.

A city in western Germany; industrial center of the Ruhr.
City in North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany; It is the administrative center of the Ruhr region, situated between the rivers Emscher and Ruhr, and has textile, chemical, and electrical industries. Its 9th–14th-century minster is one of the oldest churches in Germany.

ETYM French essence, Latin essentia, formed as if from a p. pr. of esse to be. Related to Is, Entity.
Any substance possessing to a high degree the predominant properties of a plant or drug or other natural product from which it is extracted.
In philosophy, all that makes a thing what it is and is indispensable to the thing. Philosophers have often distinguished nominal essences from real essences. A nominal essence is a group of terms used to define a concept: thus, the nominal essence of the concept of a horse could be “anything that neighs and has a mane and four legs”. A real essence is either a group of universals objectively given in nature (this is also called a form) or (as in the work of John Locke) the underlying structure of an object; for example, its atomic structure.

Member of an ancient Jewish religious sect located in the area near the Dead Sea c. 200 BC–AD 200, whose members lived a life of denial and asceticism, as they believed that the day of judgment was imminent.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, are believed by some scholars to be the library of the community. John the Baptist may have been a member of the Essenes.