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HOW TO PRONOUNCE

essential

/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/

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American Pronunciation Guide · 1:13
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What does essential mean?

adjective

  1. Necessary.
  2. Very important; of high importance.
  3. Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested.
More meanings (7)

adjective

  1. Being in the basic form; showing its essence.
  2. Really existing; existent.
  3. 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.
  4. Idiopathic.
  5. Having the nature of essence; not physical.

noun

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

Definitions regrouped for readability · CC BY-SA 4.0

IPA pronunciation

/ɪˈsɛn.ʃəl/

Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0

Other dictionary pronunciations

/əˈsɛn.tʃəl/
Wiktionary contributors · CC BY-SA 4.0

Pronunciation varies by speaker and region. About these dictionary pronunciations.

In the pages of books

See this word in context.

Popular resistance and changes in central policy have weakened China's population control program, which is essential to the nation's long-term economic viability.
United States. Central Intelligence AgencyThe 1990 CIA World FactbookProject Gutenberg ebook #14
This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phœbe.
Nathaniel HawthorneThe House of the Seven GablesProject Gutenberg ebook #77
More book examples (3)
Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this was only waste of breath, the one essential being simply to wait.
Thomas HardyTess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure WomanProject Gutenberg ebook #110
Essential, absolute truth can be known only through a response thereto of the essential, the absolute, the “what Is”, in man’s nature.
Robert Browning; Hiram CorsonAn Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's PoetryProject Gutenberg ebook #260
The position is simply that there is, broadly speaking, the endeavour to eliminate an element which is essential to successful dramatic presentation.
Alexander H. (Alexander Hay) JappRobert Louis Stevenson: A Record, an Estimate, and a MemorialProject Gutenberg ebook #590