essential
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/
ipa: /ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/
ipa: /əˈsɛn.tʃəl/
Forms: form: more essential
form: most essential
form: essentiall
Etymology: From Late Latin essentiālis, from Latin essentia (“being, essence”).
Senses: examples: text: There’s canker at the root, your seed
Denies the blessing of the sun,
The light essential to your need.
Your hopes are murdered and undone.
ref: 1941, Theodore Roethke, “Feud”, in Open House, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC; republished in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, London: Faber and Faber […], 1968, →OCLC, page 4:
text: Thus, research-based resources with the potential to assist teachers prepare secondary students for tertiary education are essential.
ref: 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 105:
synonyms: word: indispensable
word: essential
word: indispensable
word: necessar
word: necessary
word: needed
word: prerequisite
word: required
word: requisite
antonyms: accidental
accessorial
incidental
unnecessary
unneeded
glosses: Necessary.
examples: text: In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. […]
ref: 2013 May 17, George Monbiot, “Money just makes the rich suffer”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 23, page 19:
synonyms: word: crucial
word: big
word: central
word: consequential
word: critical
word: crucial
word: epochful
word: essential
word: extraordinary
word: fateful
word: fatefraught
word: fatesome
word: heavy
word: pivotal
word: high on the totem pole
word: historic
word: innegligible
word: key
word: life-or-death
word: meaningful
word: necessary
word: noted
word: noticeable
word: observable
word: outstanding
word: paramount
word: pertinent
word: relevant
word: remarkable
word: salient
word: significant
word: unignorable
word: valuable
word: vital
word: weighty
antonyms: word: unimportant
word: important
word: significant
word: weighty
word: noteworthy
word: consequential
glosses: Very important; of high importance.
topics: biology
natural-sciences
glosses: Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested.
examples: text: Don’t mind him being grumpy. That’s the essential Fred.
synonyms: word: built-in
word: essential
word: immanent
word: inbuilt
word: infused
word: ingrained
word: inherent
word: instilled
word: integral
word: intrinsic
word: inwrought
word: radical
word: bare-bones
word: austere
word: bare
word: bargain
word: basic
word: cheap
word: default
word: discreet
word: economy
word: elemental
word: elementary
word: essential
word: foundational
word: fundamental
word: incomplex
word: light
word: modest
word: no-frills
word: plain
word: pure
word: restrained
word: run-of-the-mill
word: simple
word: slimline
word: spartan
word: standard
word: stripped down
word: stripped
word: uncomplicated
word: unembellished
word: uninvolved
word: unmodified
word: unvarnished
word: vanilla
antonyms: word: adscititious
word: intrinsic
glosses: Being in the basic form; showing its essence.
examples: text: Or is it true, that thou art but a bare name, / And no eſſential thing?
ref: 1612–1613 (date written), John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy. […], London: […] Nicholas Okes, for Iohn Waterson, […], published 1623, →OCLC, Act III, scene ii:
synonyms: word: essential
word: existent
word: existing
word: extant
antonyms: word: existent
glosses: Really existing; existent.
topics: geometry
mathematics
sciences
glosses: Such that each complementary region is irreducible, the boundary of each complementary region is incompressible by disks and monogons in the complementary region, and no leaf is a sphere or a torus bounding a solid torus in the manifold.
examples: text: essential blepharospasm
topics: medicine
sciences
glosses: Idiopathic.
examples: text: It is usually allowed that there is the natural body, as St. Paul called it, which is dissolved at death, and the etheric or spiritual body which survives and functions upon an etheric plane. Those are the essential things. But we may really have as many coats as an onion and there may be a mental body which may shed itself at any spot where great mental or emotional strain has been experienced.
ref: 1925 July – 1926 May, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “In which Three Investigators Come across a Dark Soul”, in The Land of Mist (eBook no. 0601351h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, published April 2019:
glosses: Having the nature of essence; not physical.
Derived terms: bioessential
coessential
essential amino acid
essential fatty acid
essential infimum
essentialism
essentialist
essentiality
essentialization
essentialize
essentially
essential mesh
essentialness
essential nutrient
essential oil
essential prime implicant
essential property
essential salt
essential supremum
essential thrombocythemia
essential tremor
essential worker
non-essential amino acid
non-essential prime implicant
quasiessential
quintessential
semiessential
subessential
superessential