# essential

Pronunciation: say "i-SEN-shuhl" /ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/

## Adjective

1. Necessary; required for something to work or be complete.
   - Simple: Needed so much that something cannot work or happen without it.
   - _Clean water is essential to public health._
   - _Trust is an essential part of any strong friendship._
2. Highly important; carrying great weight or significance.
   - Simple: Very important and mattering a great deal.
   - _The witness gave essential testimony during the trial._
   - _She remains an essential figure in the history of American jazz._
4. Belonging to or revealing the basic nature and core character of something.
   - Simple: Showing the most basic and true nature of something.
   - _He explained the essential difference between the two ideas._
   - _The essential character of the town has not changed in fifty years._
5. Required for health or survival but not made by the body in sufficient amounts, so it must be obtained from food.
   - Simple: Needed for health but not made by the body in large enough amounts, so it must come from food.
   - _Lysine is an essential amino acid for humans._
   - _Humans need nine essential amino acids, which the body cannot build on its own and must get from protein in the diet._
6. Of a disease or condition, arising from no identifiable cause.
   - Simple: Of an illness, having no clear cause that doctors can find.
   - _Essential blepharospasm, in which the eyelids clamp shut against the patient's will, has no identifiable underlying cause._
   - _He was diagnosed with essential hypertension after other causes were ruled out._
7. Having the nature of pure essence rather than physical substance; non-material.
   - Simple: Made of pure essence or spirit, not of physical matter.

## Noun

3. Something necessary or fundamental; a basic part or thing that something cannot do without (often plural, the essentials).
   - Simple: Something you really need, or one of the basic parts that something cannot work without.
   - _A sharp knife is a kitchen essential, but most of the gadgets sold beside it in the store are not._
   - _The course covers the essentials of good writing._

## Adjective

8. Actually existing in reality rather than only imagined; real. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: Really there in the world, not made up or imagined.

## Other meanings

- (adjective) Of a lamination of a 3-manifold, having every complementary region irreducible, every region boundary incompressible by disks and monogons, and no leaf a sphere or a torus bounding a solid torus in the manifold.

## Origin

Latin essentia, meaning "being" or "essence," gave Late Latin essentiālis, the source of this word.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/essential (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).