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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
quintessence
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Consciousness rather than inanimate matter is the quintessence of his natural world.
▪ Mercury was believed to possess magical properties and some regarded it as the quintessence of the human body and of all substances.
▪ Newell and Simon wanted to know how our brains and minds function; they wanted to discover the quintessence of intelligence.
▪ Well, she thought the caravan was the quintessence of OK-ness.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Quintessence

Quintessence \Quin*tes"sence\, v. t. To distil or extract as a quintessence; to reduce to a quintessence. [R.]
--Stirling. ``Truth quintessenced and raised to the highest power.''
--J. A. Symonds.

Quintessence

Quintessence \Quin*tes"sence\, n. [F., fr. L. quinta essentia fifth essence. See Quint, and Essence.]

  1. The fifth or last and highest essence or power in a natural body. See Ferment oils, under Ferment. [Obs.]

    Note: The ancient Greeks recognized four elements, fire, air, water, and earth. The Pythagoreans added a fifth and called it nether, the fifth essence, which they said flew upward at creation and out of it the stars were made. The alchemists sometimes considered alcohol, or the ferment oils, as the fifth essence.

  2. Hence: An extract from anything, containing its rarest virtue, or most subtle and essential constituent in a small quantity; pure or concentrated essence.

    Let there be light, said God; and forthwith light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep.
    --Milton.

  3. The most characteristic form or most perfect example of some type of object.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
quintessence

early 15c., in ancient and medieval philosophy, "pure essence, substance of which the heavenly bodies are composed," literally "fifth essence," from Middle French quinte essence (14c.), from Medieval Latin quinta essentia, from Latin quinta, fem. of quintus "fifth" (see quinque-) + essentia (see Parousia).\n

\nA loan-translation of Greek pempte ousia, the "ether" added by Aristotle to the four known elements (water, earth, fire, air) and said to permeate all things. Its extraction was one of the chief goals of alchemy. Sense of "purest essence" (of a situation, character, etc.) is first recorded 1580s.

Wiktionary
quintessence

n. 1 A thing that is the most perfect example of its type; the most perfect embodiment of something. 2 A pure substance. 3 The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form. 4 (context alchemy English) The fifth alchemical element, or essence, after earth, air, fire, and water 5 (context physics English) A hypothetical form of dark energy postulated to explain observations of an accelerate universe. vb. (cx transitive English) To reduce to its purest and most concentrated essence.

WordNet
quintessence
  1. n. the fifth and highest element after air and earth and fire and water; was believed to be the substance composing all heavenly bodies [syn: ether]

  2. the purest and most concentrated essence of something

  3. the most typical example or representative of a type

Wikipedia
Quintessence (physics)

In physics, quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field, postulated as an explanation of the observation of an accelerating rate of expansion of the universe, rather than due to a true cosmological constant. The first example of this scenario was proposed by Ratra and Peebles (1988). The concept was expanded to more general types of time-varying dark energy and the term "quintessence" was first introduced in a paper by R.R.Caldwell, Rahul Dave and Paul Steinhardt. It has been proposed by some physicists to be a fifth fundamental force. Quintessence differs from the cosmological constant explanation of dark energy in that it is dynamic, that is, it changes over time, unlike the cosmological constant which always stays constant. It is suggested that quintessence can be either attractive or repulsive depending on the ratio of its kinetic and potential energy. Specifically, it is thought (proposed?) that quintessence became repulsive about ten billion years ago (the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old).

Quintessence (English band)

Quintessence was a rock band formed in April 1969 in Notting Hill, London, England. Their style was a mixture of jazz, psychedelic rock and progressive rock with an influence of music from India.

Quintessence

Quintessence may refer to:

Quintessence (The Soil Bleeds Black album)

Quintessence is the fifth album by The Soil Bleeds Black. The album moves more in a Neo-folk direction from their previous works, while keeping a foot in the neo-Medieval sounds for which they are known.

Quintessence (Finnish band)

Quintessence is a Finnish jazz-band, whose first record, White Light ( EP) was released in 2001.

The band's music is described as combination of neo soul, jazz, and funk music. The band has toured in Estonia, Norway and the Netherlands. Their record company is Texicalli.

Quintessence (Quintessence album)

Quintessence is the second studio album by the English group Quintessence.

Quintessence (disambiguation)
Quintessence (Bill Evans album)

Quintessence is an album by American jazz pianist Bill Evans. It was recorded in 1976 for Fantasy Records and released the following year. At this time usually playing solo or with his trio, for these sessions Evans was the leader of an all-star quintet featuring Harold Land on tenor saxophone, guitarist Kenny Burrell, Ray Brown on bass, and Philly Joe Jones drums.

Quintessence (Borknagar album)

Quintessence is Borknagar's fourth studio album. It was recorded at The Abyss Studios in January 2000 and mixed by Peter Tägtgren.

According to interviews, this album was meant to be a strictly straightforward black metal album, as shown on the production quality and the fact that ICS Vortex's vocals are more of the traditional black metal screams and growls, with less clean singing.

This album marks bassist Kai K. Lie's departure from the band, with vocalist ICS Vortex taking over bass duties. It also marks the departure of keyboardist Ivar Bjørnson (being replaced with Lars A. Nedland) and drummer Grim (being replaced with Asgeir Mickelson), who incidentally committed suicide a few months before the album's release. This would also be Vortex's last album as vocalist of Borknagar before quitting the band to join Dimmu Borgir (reportedly due to an ultimatum on Øystein Brun's part), until his return in 2010.

Quintessence (French band)

Quintessence is a French black metal band founded in 2005 in Poitiers, France.

Quintessence (horse)

Quintessence (1900–1917) was a British Thoroughbred racehorse who won the 1000 Guineas of 1903 and was unbeaten in her six races. She was owned and bred by Evelyn Edward Thomas Boscawen, 7th Viscount Falmouth. After retiring from racing she became a successful broodmare, with her son Clarissimus winning the 2000 Guineas.

Quintessence (restaurant)

Quintessence is a Michelin 3-star Japanese French fusion restaurant in Shinagawa, Japan. It is difficult to reserve a table in the restaurant and has been listed as among the 50 best restaurants in Asia by CNN.

The head chef is Shuzo Kishida from Aichi Prefecture. Kishida worked for L'Astrance in Paris and studied French culinary arts.

Quintessence (Spontaneous Music Ensemble album)

Quintessence is a live album by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble featuring percussionist/cornetist John Stevens saxophonists Trevor Watts and Evan Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey, and bassist Kent Carter which was recorded in 1973 and released on the Emanem label. The album was first released in two parts on separate LPs entitles Eighty Five Minutes in 1986 then with additional material as two separate CDs entitled Quintessence in 1997 and finally as a single 2-CD set in 2007.

Usage examples of "quintessence".

It was the very quintessence of air, quickening every sense so that he smelt more keenly, heard more clearly, saw things in sharper outline.

He seemed to have entered a world where the purity of the air was a positive thing, not the mere absence of impure matter, but the quintessence of all that was vital in Nature.

Thou art He before the revelations of Whose omnipotence the quintessence of power hath trembled.

God of mercy, before Whose door the quintessence of mercy hath bowed down, and round the sanctuary of Whose Cause loving-kindness, in its inmost spirit, hath circled, we beseech Thee, entreating Thine ancient grace, and seeking Thy present favor, that Thou mayest have mercy upon all who are the manifestations of the world of being, and deny them not the outpourings of Thy grace in Thy days.

The voice of reason is feeble against human stupidity, and the Muller family, collectively and individually, represent the quintessence of feeblemindedness.

She was the quintessence of all nannies, opinionated, faithful, illogical, exasperating and admirable.

Controller of Love or Hate, this science can at pleasure confer on human hearts Paradise or Hell: it disposes at will of all forms, and distributes beauty or deformity as it pleases: it changes in turn, with the rod of Circe, men into brutes and animals into men: it even disposes of Life or of Death, and can bestow on its adepts riches by the transmutation of metals, and immortality by its quintessence and elixir, compounded of gold and light.

This Leniency, therefore, was, as it were, the very essence and quintessence of the Permanence and Stability of the plan of Creation, and part of the Very Nature of the Deity.

They have a saturation that makes them look as if they were the quintessence of a life of passion, and they are among the most precious diamonds of our poetry.

They might have spoken of an intent to transform the club into a node, a source of plentiful Quintessence, but the club would never develop into any such thing.

The sphere of Prime, the magick of manipulating the power that underlay all magick, to bind Quintessence to the link and make it all permanent.

The reddish light was a scanning function, combining the spheres of Life and Prime to check for extra Quintessence stored in the patterns of the people below.

He drew desperately on the Quintessence stored within him, pushing back the madness of reality gone wild and trying to find an anchor to hold himself steady.

Kate triggered the spell in the glasses that scanned for Quintessence just as the man standing behind Aaron died a sudden and brutal death.

Like the glasses, they were capable of making active magick and the flow of Quintessence visible, although the binoculars did not have to be preprogrammed with target patterns.