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  • In the French of Montaigne's day, the word essai meant something assayed or essayed … an experiment, a tasting.

    Slate Magazine

  • -- The essai is the tasting of each dish by the gentlemen servants and officers of the table before the king partakes of it.

    The Ancient Regime

  • Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. News


    Begging the Question

  • Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" (the cousin of our word assay), and an "essai" is an effort.

    A Version 1.0

  • Et je pense que c'était vous qui a écrite le petit essai sur les tabliers des femmes, il y a quelques mois?

    rubrique - French Word-A-Day

  • The highbrow literary equivalent of bullshit might be the "essay," with its French etymology in "essai," or, to try.

    Pamela Haag, Ph.D.: The Bullshit Paradox

  • It's a pleasure to exchange ideas with him, for there is always a sense of exploration, joint pursuit, essai.


  • Montaigne coined the term ‘essai’ from the verb ‘essayer’, meaning to try or attempt.

    Introducing Montaigne

  • His analysis, like that of Emmanuel Todd in La chute final: essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1975) and Medvedev (Soviet Agriculture), sidesteps the thorny issue of the extent to which Soviet statistics were falsified and/or exaggerated: there is a certain consistency even in fictionalized data.



