Other forms: essences
The essence of something is the core that makes it what it is — take that away and it turns into something else. The essence of her argument fits into one sentence; the essence of a good sandwich is the bread.
There is a second essence sitting in the baking cupboard: vanilla essence, almond essence, a small brown bottle of something concentrated pulled out of a plant. Two fixed phrases carry the word a long way — in essence means once everything else is stripped off, and time is of the essence means the deadline matters more than anything. Essential is the adjective, though it has drifted towards 'necessary' and away from 'belonging to the core'. Philosophers set essence against accident: your height is accidental, what makes you you is essential. In the abstract sense essence has no plural — the essence of the problem, never the essences of it.
1nounessenceThe core quality that makes something what it is.
“He captured the essence of the town in three photographs.”
2nounconcentratedA concentrated liquid taken from a plant, used for flavour or scent.
“Add a teaspoon of vanilla essence to the batter.”
Essence is a manufactured word. Latin writers needed something to match the Greek ousia, 'being', so they built essentia out of esse, 'to be' — a noun meaning roughly is-ness. It travelled through Middle French into English, still carrying that flat, enormous claim: the part of a thing that simply is.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁es-
Ancient Greek
οὐσία — being
Latin
essentia — the being or essence of a thing
Middle French
essence
Middle English
essence
English, today
essence
Built from
From Middle English essence, from Middle French essence, from Latin essentia (“the being or essence of a thing”), from an artificial formation of esse (“to be”), to translate Ancient Greek οὐσία (“being”), from ὤν, present participle of εἰμί (“to be, exist”). Displaced native Old English understandennes (literally, "understanden-ness").
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA