mesa

plural mesas

1. A flat area of land or plateau higher than other land, with one or more clifflike edges.

   A few more miles of hot sand and gravel and red stone brought us around a low mesa to the Little Colorado River.

   2 more examples

   Low mesas, dry, treeless, stretch back from the brink of the canyon, often showing smooth surfaces of naked, solid rock.

   1895, J[ohn] W[esley] Powell, chapter I, in Canyons of the Colorado, Meadville, PA: Flood & Vincent; republished as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, New York: Dover, 1961, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 32

   Those multitoned buttes and mesas [of the Grand Canyon], and that incandescent sequence of colorful bands that make one of the natural wonders of the world so grand, can also be found over 100 million miles away [on Mars].

   2013 November 27, John Grotzinger, “The world of Mars [print version: International Herald Tribune Magazine, 2013, p. 36]”, in The New York Times

2. businessa structure with components rising above the insulating substrate that surrounds it

   The ohmic contacts were deposited at the edge of the mesa.

1. A place in the United States:
   1. A city in Maricopa County, Arizona.
   2. A census-designated place in Inyo County, California.
   3. An unincorporated community in Mesa County, Colorado.
   4. An unincorporated community in Adams County, Idaho.
   5. A minor city in Franklin County, Washington.
2. A town in Mozambique.
3. A surname.

1. USabbreviationacronymAcronym of Mining Enforcement and Safety Administration.