Word.ws English Dictionary

Esselen

Esselen noun: an indigenous population native to the region of Big Sur on the Central Coast of California.

Noun

Esselen pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) An indigenous population native to the region of Big Sur on the Central Coast of California.

Proper noun

Esselen

  1. The language of this people.

Origin of Esselen

The name Esselen "probably derived from the name of a major native village", possibly from the village known as Exse'ein, or the place called Eslenes, the site of the Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo. The Spanish extended the term to mean the entire linguistic group (Hester 1978:498-499).

Questions about Esselen

What does Esselen mean?
Esselen means an indigenous population native to the region of Big Sur on the Central Coast of California.
What part of speech is Esselen?
Esselen can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near Esselen in the dictionary

  1. esse
  2. essed
  3. essedum
  4. Essegian
  5. Essegians
  6. Esselen
  7. Esselenian
  8. Esselman
  9. Esselmans
  10. Essen
  11. essence

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Esselen (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Esselen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/esselen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.