# essential

> English word · Adjective · IPA /ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/ · frequency rank #2,440

## Definitions
1. Necessary.
2. Very important; of high importance.
3. Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested.
4. Being in the basic form; showing its essence.
5. Really existing; existent.
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.
7. Idiopathic.
8. Having the nature of essence; not physical.

## Etymology
From Late Latin essentiālis, from Latin essentia (“being, essence”).

## Easily confused with
- **essentially** (https://plainspell.com/en/vs/essential-vs-essentially)

## Common misspellings (11)
`esential`, `esesntial`, `essenital`, `essenntial`, `essentail`, `essentiall`, `essentila`, `essenttial`, `essetnial`, `essnetial`, `sesential`

## Source
Compiled from Wiktionary via kaikki.org (CC BY-SA). Data vintage: 2026-05-06.
Canonical page: https://plainspell.com/en/word/essential