The difference between Crucial and Essential

When used as adjectives, crucial means essential or decisive for determining the outcome or future of something, whereas essential means necessary.


Essential is also noun with the meaning: a necessary ingredient.

check bellow for the other definitions of Crucial and Essential

  1. Crucial as an adjective:

    Essential or decisive for determining the outcome or future of something; extremely important.

    Examples:

    "The battle of Tali-Ihantala in 1944 is one of the crucial moments in the history of Finland."

    "A secure supply of crude oil is crucial for any modern nation, let alone a superpower."

  2. Crucial as an adjective (archaic):

    Cruciform or cruciate; cross-shaped.

  3. Crucial as an adjective (slang, chiefly, Jamaica):

    Very good; excellent; particularly applied to reggae music.

    Examples:

    "Delbert Wilkins is the most crucial pirate radio DJ in Brixton."

  1. Essential as an adjective:

    Necessary.

  2. Essential as an adjective:

    Very important; of high importance.

  3. Essential as an adjective (biology):

    for survival but not by the organism, thus needing to be ingested

  4. Essential as an adjective:

    Being in the basic form; showing its essence.

    Examples:

    "Don’t mind him being grumpy. That’s the essential Fred."

  5. Essential as an adjective:

    Really existing; existent.

  6. Essential as an adjective (of a [[lamination]] of a 3-[[manifold]]):

    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.

    Examples:

    "rfex difference between 1 and 2"

  7. Essential as an adjective (medicine):

    Idiopathic.

  1. Essential as a noun:

    A necessary ingredient.

  2. Essential as a noun:

    A fundamental ingredient.