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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

essential.

Necessary.

9 characters3 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/Canada, UK/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/US/əˈsɛn.tʃəl/US
  1. Necessary.

  2. Very important; of high importance.

    I see it as essential that there should be somewhere to park.
  3. Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested.

  4. Being in the basic form; showing its essence.

    Don’t mind him being grumpy. That’s the essential Fred.
  5. Really existing; existent.

  6. 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.

  7. Idiopathic.

    essential blepharospasm
  8. Having the nature of essence; not physical.

Where this word comes from

From Late Latin essentiālis, from Latin essentia (“being, essence”).

noun/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/Canada, UK/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/US/əˈsɛn.tʃəl/US
  1. A necessary ingredient.

  2. A fundamental ingredient.

Where this word comes from

From Late Latin essentiālis, from Latin essentia (“being, essence”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.