crucial
- 1So important that the result or future course of something depends on it.
Witness testimony proved crucial to the outcome of the trial.
Timing is crucial when transplanting seedlings into the garden.
Similaressential, critical, vital, key, important
Oppositeunimportant, insignificant, trivial, inessential
Note
Behind the everyday meaning stands Latin crux, "cross", which English also borrowed whole: what is crucial is the crux of the matter. The adjective takes for or to (crucial for any modern nation, crucial to the outcome). It sits comfortably before a noun, as in a crucial moment, or after a verb, as in is therefore crucial. It compares with more and most, and its plain opposite is noncrucial.
- 2Very good or excellent, applied particularly to reggae music.
The selector spun a crucial roots track and the whole dance erupted.
That dub plate from Kingston is crucial: sweetest bassline I've heard all year.
Similarwicked, excellent, killer
Oppositelousy
Note
Praise from Jamaican and Bermudan slang, at home around reggae and the people who spin it. It is the word for the most crucial pirate radio DJ in Brixton, a crucial tune, a crucial set. It grades like any adjective of approval. Away from that scene, listeners will reach first for the "extremely important" meaning, so it works best among speakers who already share the slang.
- 3Cross-shaped; cruciform or cruciate in form.
Note
The literal meaning the word arrived with in 1706. French crucial named the ligaments of the knee, so called because they cross each other. Today it is archaic, and cruciform or cruciate do this work instead. A modern reader meeting a "crucial" shape will hear the everyday "vital" sense, so keep this one for quoting or imitating older writing.
Practice
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Origin
First recorded in 1706, from French crucial, a medical term for the ligaments of the knee (which cross each other), from Latin crux, crucis ("cross"), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- ("to turn, to bend"). The meaning "decisive, critical" was extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, the notion being of cross-shaped signposts at forking roads that require a choice.