Word.ws English Dictionary

must-have

must-have adjective: essential to own.

Adjective

must-have

  1. Essential to own.
    • The must-have toy is the apotheosis of the marketing of toys as fashion accessories.2003 December 15, The New Yorker, page 69

Noun

must-have (plural must-haves)

  1. An item that one must own, or a feature that is essential to a service, etc.
    • The selfie-stick is this year's must-have.
    • There's a huge gulf between “must-have” and “nice-to-have” products. If you sell a nice-to-have product, no one, not even your best friends, will use it long term. We all focus on must-haves.2021, Steven S. Hoffman, Surviving a Startup, HarperCollins, →ISBN, page 58

Forms of must-have

pluralmust-haves

Origin of must-have

From must + have.

Questions about must-have

What does must-have mean?
Must-have means essential to own.
What part of speech is must-have?
Must-have can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near must-have in the dictionary

  1. must weights
  2. must've
  3. must've been the wind
  4. must-buy
  5. must-buys
  6. must-have
  7. must-haves
  8. must-learn
  9. must-learns
  10. must-link
  11. must-listening

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: must-have (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “must-have.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/must-have. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.