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mesa

[mey-suh]

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noun

a land formation, less extensive than a plateau, having steep walls and a relatively flat top and common in arid and semiarid parts of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico.

Origin:
1750–60, Americanism; < Spanish: table < Latin mēnsa

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Mesa is always a great word to know.

So is quincunx. Does it mean:

an arrangement of five objects, as trees, in a square or rectangle, one at each corner and one in the middle.

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

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Example Sentences

As a result, the formations stay the same height as the original plateau or mesa.

What's obvious in the photo is the cliff-forming sandstone unit capping the mesa.

Mesa was looking for stray sheep when he came across the dinosaur fossil.

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Dictionary.com Unabridged

noun

a city in central Arizona, near Phoenix. 152,453.

noun

a city in SW California. 50,342.

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Link To Mesa

Collins

World English Dictionary

mesa (ˈmeɪsə)

—n
	a flat tableland with steep edges, common in the southwestern US

[from Spanish: table]

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

mesa

"high table land," 1759, from Sp. mesa, lit. "table," from L. mensa "table" (cf. Rum. masa, O.Fr. moise "table").

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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American Heritage

Science Dictionary

mesa (mā'sə) Pronunciation Key
An area of high land with a flat top and two or more steep, clifflike sides. Mesas are larger than buttes and smaller than plateaus, and are common in the southwest United States.

FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

Mesa definition

Xerox PARC, 1977. System and application programming for proprietary hardware: Alto, Dolphin, Dorado and Dandelion. Pascal-like syntax, ALGOL68-like semantics. An early version was weakly typed. Mesa's modules with separately compilable definition and implementation parts directly led to Wirth's design for Modula. Threads, coroutines (fork/join), exceptions, and monitors. Type checking may be disabled. Mesa was used internally by Xerox to develop ViewPoint, the Xerox Star, MDE, and the controller of a high-end copier. It was released to a few universitites in 1985. Succeeded by Cedar.
["Mesa Language Manual", J.G. Mitchell et al, Xerox PARC, CSL-79-3 (Apr 1979)].
["Early Experience with Mesa", Geschke et al, CACM 20(8):540-552 (Aug 1977)].

American Heritage

Abbreviations & Acronyms

MESA
microsurgical epididymal sperm aspiration