essential

English

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/, [əˈsɛn.tʃəl]
  • Audio (US)(file)
  • Hyphenation: es‧sen‧tial

Adjective

essential (comparative more essential, superlative most essential)

  1. Necessary.
  2. Very important; of high importance.
    • 2013 May 17, George Monbiot, “Money just makes the rich suffer”, in The Guardian Weekly‎, volume 188, number 23, page 19:
      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. […]
  3. (biology) 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.
    • Webster (1623)
      Is it true, that thou art but a name, / And no essential thing?
  6. (of a lamination of a 3-manifold) 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?)
  7. (medicine) Idiopathic.

Synonyms

The terms below need to be checked and allocated to the definitions (senses) of the headword above. Each term should appear in the sense for which it is appropriate. Use the templates {{syn|en|...}} or {{ant|en|...}} to add them to the appropriate sense(s).

Antonyms

The terms below need to be checked and allocated to the definitions (senses) of the headword above. Each term should appear in the sense for which it is appropriate. Use the templates {{syn|en|...}} or {{ant|en|...}} to add them to the appropriate sense(s).

Derived terms

Translations

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.

Noun

essential (plural essentials)

  1. A necessary ingredient.
  2. A fundamental ingredient.

(Can we add an example for this sense?)

Translations

Anagrams

Latin

Pronunciation

  • (Classical) IPA(key): /esˈsen.ti.aːl/, [ɛsˈsɛn.ti.aːɫ]

Noun

essentiāl n (genitive essentiālis); third declension

  1. essentials (essential qualities)

Inflection

Third declension neuter.

Case Singular Plural
nominative essentiāl essentiāla
genitive essentiālis essentiālum
dative essentiālī essentiālibus
accusative essentiāl essentiāla
ablative essentiāle essentiālibus
vocative essentiāl essentiāla
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.