Essence

How to spell essence

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce essence

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does essence mean?

1. nounThe basic, intrinsic quality or nature that makes something what it is.
2. nounA concentrated liquid extract holding the characteristic flavour or scent of a plant.

Essence in a sentence

• The essence of her argument was that the budget needed cutting.

• The recipe called for a teaspoon of vanilla essence.

• Freedom of choice is the very essence of a fair market.

• She added a few drops of almond essence to the icing.

Where does essence come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin essentia, an abstract noun meaning 'being' or 'the quality of existing', which philosophers coined directly from the verb esse, meaning 'to be'. The Romans built essentia deliberately to translate a Greek philosophical idea about what makes a thing fundamentally what it is, the inner nature that cannot be removed without the thing ceasing to exist. English took the word in during the fourteenth century by way of Old French essence, at first for that same abstract sense of true inner nature. By the seventeenth century it had also gained the concrete meaning of a concentrated extract distilled from a plant, the part holding its characteristic smell or flavour, as in vanilla essence. The same esse root still hums quietly inside familiar relatives like 'essential' and even 'present', and the spelling trap is the doubled middle: two letter s sounds spelled 'ss', then the soft '-ence' ending rather than '-ance'.

How the word is built

• ess- (from Latin esse: to be)
• -ence (noun suffix denoting a quality or state)