mesa
nounUK, US /ˈmeɪ.sə/
Etymology First attested 1759, from Spanish mesa (“table”), from Latin mēnsa. Doublet of mensa.
1
A flat area of land or plateau higher than other land, with one or more clifflike edges.
- 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.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:
1 more example
- 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].2013 November 27, John Grotzinger, “The world of Mars [print version: International Herald Tribune Magazine, 2013, p. 36]”, in The New York Times:
2
Business, Electrical engineering, Electricity, Electromagnetism, Electronics, Energy, Engineering, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Physics a structure with components rising above the insulating substrate that surrounds it
- The ohmic contacts were deposited at the edge of the mesa.
- Derived terms
- Antelope Mesa, Big Mountain Mesa, Black Mesa, First Mesa, Mesa County, mesalike, nanomesa, Second Mesa, Third Mesa
- Related terms
- tablemount