essentiall

Adjective

essential (comparative more essential, superlative most essential)

1. Necessary.
   • There’s canker at the root, your seed
     Denies the blessing of the sun,
     The light essential to your need.
     Your hopes are murdered and undone.1941, Theodore Roethke, “Feud”, in Open House, New York, N.Y.: Alfred A[braham] Knopf, →OCLC; republished in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, London: Faber and Faber […], 1968, →OCLC, page 4

   Synonyms:

   indispensable, basic, necessar, necessary, necessitous, needed, prerequisite, required, requisite

   Antonyms:

   accidental, accessorial, incidental, unnecessary, unneeded

2. Very important; of high importance.
   • I see it as essential that there should be somewhere to park.

   Synonyms:

   crucial, big, central, consequential, critical, epochful, extraordinary, fateful, fatefraught, fatesome

   Antonyms:

   unimportant, base, contemptible, floccinaucinihilipilificatious, foolish, for the birds, futile, frivolous, idle, ignorable

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.

   Synonyms:

   built-in, immanent, inborn, resident, inbuilt, infused, ingrained, inherent, integral, intrinsic

   Antonyms:

   adscititious, accidental, external, extraneous, extrinsic

5. Really existing; existent.
   • Or is it true, that thou art but a bare name, / And no eſſential thing?1612–1613 (date written), John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy. […], London: […] Nicholas Okes, for Iohn Waterson, […], published 1623, →OCLC, Act III, scene ii

   Synonyms:

   existent, existing, extant

   Antonyms:

   absent, beingless, extinct, inessential, inexistent, nonexistent, null, zilch

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.

See all 10 meanings of essential