Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Of or relating to an essay or a writer of essays.
  • adjective Resembling an essay in nature or quality.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or characteristic of an essay or of an essayist.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Characteristic of, or proper to, an essayist

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

essayist +‎ -ic

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Examples

  • Christian, I just have to add — your bile toward the essayistic is amusing because your posts are the most essayistic of all us bloggers; like old-school LP, you compartmentalize the essayistic and the performative.

    Writing and Failure (Part 8) : Christian Bök : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007

  • I think blogs can do this in individual posts, but I also think they can do it in their totality — I mean, if you consider the entire output of a blogger you really like, chances are you’ll see the kind of essayistic thinking you describe here.

    Blogs and Essays « Tales from the Reading Room 2008

  • In the financial punditry racket, there's no voice quite like the Financial Times' John Kay, certainly not in the United States: skeptical, elliptical, calm, essayistic, sneakily funny.

    Robert Teitelman: Appreciating John Kay Robert Teitelman 2011

  • The essayistic manner in which MIÉVILLE wrote "There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkein Rocks" makes it for a dense, scholary read, but the five reasons can, basically, be boiled down to this:

    China Miéville on J.R.R. Tolkien 2009

  • I felt a lot of my fiction to be very essayistic, very tick-all-the-boxes, so I wanted to give this one an essay title and do exactly the opposite; be free with it, let it go its own way.

    A Conversation with Zadie Smith about On Beauty 2010

  • In the financial punditry racket, there's no voice quite like the Financial Times' John Kay, certainly not in the United States: skeptical, elliptical, calm, essayistic, sneakily funny.

    Robert Teitelman: Appreciating John Kay Robert Teitelman 2011

  • It's hard to remember how confrontational and strange his essayistic personal style seemed when audiences first encountered it.

    Werner Herzog, the adventurous spirit 2011

  • The essayistic manner in which MIÉVILLE wrote "There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkein Rocks" makes it for a dense, scholary read, but the five reasons can, basically, be boiled down to this:

    Archive 2009-06-01 2009

  • He presented the history of the Roman liturgy in an interesting, essayistic way and by this he presented a popular and profound analysis of the liturgical problem.

    12th Liturgical Conference of Cologne 2009

  • Susan Sontag sounds like Susan Sontag whether we read the essayistic Illness as Metaphor (1978) or the novel The Volcano Lover (1992).

    Style in Fiction 2009

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