Quintessential means showing a quality in its purest form. The quintessential Englishman, quintessentially British, a quintessential example.
The word has a strange origin: the quintessence was the fifth element after earth, water, air and fire, the pure substance the heavens were supposedly made of. What survives is the sense of the pure distilled thing.
1adjectivequintessentialShowing a quality in its purest form.
“With its red phone box and village pub, it's the quintessential English village.”
quintessential is a quality.
From quintessence, the fifth essence, the pure substance medieval philosophers held the heavens were made of.
Proto-Indo-European
*h₁es-
Medieval Latin
quinta essentia — fifth essence, aether
English
quintessence
English, today
quintessential
From quintessence + -al. quintessence comes from Middle English -, borrowed from Middle French -, from Medieval Latin quinta essentia (“fifth essence, aether”), equivalent to quint- + essence. "Essence" in this context is a synonym for "element". In pre-atomic/Aristotelian theory, there are four known elements or essences — Earth, Air, Fire and Water — and a putative fifth element (aether), which is considered to be of exceptional superior quality to the other four basic elements.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA