essential

About 65.51 uses per million words.

Meaning

1. adjective Necessary.
2. adjective Very important; of high importance.

   I see it as essential that there should be somewhere to park.

3. adjective Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested.
4. adjective Being in the basic form; showing its essence.

   Don’t mind him being grumpy. That’s the essential Fred.

5. adjective Really existing; existent.
6. adjective 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.

   (Can we add an example for this sense? (difference between 1 and 2))

7. adjective Idiopathic.

   essential blepharospasm

8. adjective Having the nature of essence; not physical.

Similar words

necessary requisite necessity requirement must basic important of the essence all-important crucial

Often followed by

to for that part in and element elements features

Word family

essentialness essentialnesses essentials