in essence

Idioms  

1. Basically, by nature, as in He is in essence a very private person or In essence, they were asking the wrong question. This term employs essence in the sense of “intrinsic nature,” a usage dating from the mid-1600s.

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

in essence

“I’ve always associated horror with summertime, actually. Like ‘Friday the 13th,’ ‘Sleepaway Camp’” — in essence, the freedom of summer invaded by fear and death.

From Salon ● Jun. 30, 2026

Computer learning will, in essence, turn somewhat retro with classes using alternative options such as laptop carts or computer lab models.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 23, 2026

In 1946, the wildly prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős asked, in essence, how to place dots on a tabletop so that the greatest number of pairs of dots are the same distance apart.

From Slate ● Jun. 22, 2026

“For me, human rights in essence is about human agency,” Roth said in an interview.

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 21, 2026

I saw that the question with which I had wrestled in that Chapter 14 was in essence the question Yali had asked me in 1972, merely transferred to a different part of the world.

From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond

Related Words

• actually
• approximately
• necessarily
• originally
• permanently
• quite
• really
• substantially
• truly
• typically
• virtually