Lisp: What is an S-expression?

I spent some time last night reading the book, Practical Common Lisp. In all Lisp books you’ll read about S-expressions, but very few authors explain what they are. This image comes from this Wikipedia page, which states, “In computing, s-expressions (for “symbolic expression”) are a notation for nested list (tree-structured) data, invented for and popularized by the programming language Lisp, which uses them for source code as well as data. In the usual parenthesized syntax of Lisp, an s-expression is classically defined as a) an atom, or b) an expression of the form (x . y) where x and y are s-expressions.” See that link for more information about Lisp and S-expressions.