Primary
''mesa'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260213210016-00-⌔
mesa - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
mesa (plural mesas)
- A flat area of land or plateau higher than other land, with one or more clifflike edges.
- ✤ Hyponyms: potrero, tuya
- ✤ Coordinate term: butte
- ✤ A few more miles of hot sand and gravel and red stone brought us around a low mesa to the Little Colorado River.
- ✤ Low mesas, dry, treeless, stretch back from the brink of the canyon, often showing smooth surfaces of naked, solid rock.1
- ✤ Those multitoned buttes and mesas [of the Grand Canyon], and that incandescent sequence of colorful bands that make one of the natural wonders of the world so grand, can also be found over 100 million miles away [on Mars].2
- (electronics) a structure with components rising above the insulating substrate that surrounds it
- ✤ The ohmic contacts were deposited at the edge of the mesa.
Etymology
First attested 1759, from Spanish mesa (“table”), from Latin mēnsa. Doublet of mensa.
Pronunciation
- (UK, US) enPR: māʹsə, IPA: /ˈmeɪ.sə/, /ˈmɛ.sə/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
- Rhymes: -eɪsə
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 32: ↩
2013 November 27, John Grotzinger, “The world of Mars [print version: International Herald Tribune Magazine, 2013, p. 36]”, in The New York Times : ↩
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