Definition of quintessential
: perfectly typical or representative of a particular kind of person or thing
- Jerry's your quintessential streetwise New Yorker …
- —Kai Wright
- This is the quintessential Los Angeles restaurant, casual but never frumpy, lively but not overheated …
- —Harvey Steiman
- Marx was the quintessential intellectual, remarkably detached from the real world.
- —John Steele Gordon
- His very faults were middling … It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity.
- —George Eliot
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quintessentially
adverb-
- It is commonly accepted … that the rocking chair was an American invention, perhaps the most quintessentially American furniture form ever invented.
- —Linda Rosenkrantz
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- There's no occupation more quintessentially macho than that of private detective.
- —Cynthia Crossen
