Other forms: essentials
Essential means you cannot manage without it. Water is essential, a passport is essential at the border, and the essential thing in bread is flour, because take the flour out and there is no bread.
The word reaches in two directions. The first is plain necessity, and it takes TO or FOR: essential to the plan, essential for growth, and in careful writing "it is essential that everyone be told". The second is quieter and older, meaning belonging to the very nature of a thing, as in the essential difference between the two systems. Essential oils are not necessary oils; they are the oils carrying the essence, the smell, of a plant. As a noun it lives in the plural, the essentials, the bare essentials, a bag with nothing in it but essentials. And since essential already means absolutely necessary, "very essential" is one step too far.
1adjectiveessentialSo necessary that something cannot work or exist without it.
“A good pair of boots is essential if you are walking all day.”
synonyms: vital, crucial, indispensable
2adjectivebelongingBelonging to the basic nature of something.
“The essential difference between the two plans is who pays.”
3nounplural(in the plural) the things you cannot do without.
“He packed only the essentials: passport, charger, toothbrush.”
essential is a quality of being needed.
Also accepted in games: vital, crucial
From Latin essentialis, formed on essentia, meaning being or essence, the answer to what a thing actually is. So the essential part is the part without which the rest stops being itself.
Latin
essentiālis
English, today
essential
Borrowed from Latin essentiālis. From Latin essentiālis, from Latin essentia (“being, essence”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA