mesa

[mey-suh] /ˈmeɪ sə/
noun
1.
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

Mesa

[mey-suh] /ˈmeɪ sə/
noun
1.
a city in central Arizona, near Phoenix.

La Mesa

[lah mey-suh] /lɑ ˈmeɪ sə/
noun
1.
a city in SW California.
Examples from the web for mesa
  • As a result, the formations stay the same height as the original plateau or mesa.
  • He is staring up at a giant wind turbine, towering several hundred feet high above the bleak desert mesa.
  • What's obvious in the photo is the cliff-forming sandstone unit capping the mesa.
  • And then we've made it, to the sprawling, piñon-dotted top of the mesa.
  • mesa was looking for stray sheep when he came across the dinosaur fossil.
  • mesa a fresh start despite street protests that paralyzed parts of the nation.
  • It is reached by driving south toward the tip of a huge triangular mesa.
  • The lighter object is another mesa, though the top is not quite flat.
  • The mesa is part of a wide, shallow syncline that plunges or tilts to the south.
British Dictionary definitions for mesa

mesa

/ˈmeɪsə/
noun
1.
a flat tableland with steep edges, common in the southwestern US
Word Origin
from Spanish: table
Word Origin and History for mesa
n.

"high table land," 1759, from Spanish mesa "plateau," literally "table," from Latin mensa "table" (source of Rumanian masa, Old French moise "table").

mesa in Science
mesa
  (mā'sə)   
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.
mesa in Technology


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)].

Related Abbreviations for mesa

MESA

microsurgical epididymal sperm aspiration