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Essential vs Enhance - What's the difference?

essential | enhance |

As an adjective essential

is necessary.

As a noun essential

is a necessary ingredient.

As a verb enhance is

(obsolete) to lift, raise up.

essential

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Necessary.
  • Very important; of high importance.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-05-17
    • , author=George Monbiot, authorlink=George Monbiot , title=Money just makes the rich suffer , volume=188, issue=23, page=19 , magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) citation , passage=In order to grant the rich these pleasures, the social contract is reconfigured. The welfare state is dismantled. Essential public services are cut so that the rich may pay less tax. […]}}
  • Being in the basic form; showing its essence.
    • Don’t mind him being grumpy. That’s the essential Fred.
  • Really existing; existent.
  • * Webster (1623)
    • Is it true, that thou art but a name, / And no essential thing?
  • 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.
  • (medicine) Idiopathic.

    • Synonyms

    * indispensable, crucial, substantive * See also

    Antonyms

    * inessential, unessential, accidental, nonessential, unneeded, adscititious, unimportant, accessorial, unnecessary, incidental

    Derived terms

    * essential amino acid * essential fatty acid * essential listening * essential nutrient * essential oil * essentially * essentialness * quintessential

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A necessary ingredient.
  • A fundamental ingredient.

    • Related terms

    * essence ----

    enhance

    English

    Alternative forms

    * inhance * enhaunce * inhaunce

    Verb

    (enhanc)
  • (obsolete) To lift, raise up.
  • * 1590 , Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene , I.i:
    • nought aghast, his mightie hand enhaunst : / The stroke down from her head vnto her shoulder glaunst.
    (Wyclif Bible)
  • To augment or make something greater.
  • * Southey
    • The reputation of ferocity enhanced the value of their services, in making them feared as well as hated.
  • * 2000 , Mordecai Roshwald, Liberty: Its Meaning and Scope , page 155
    • A hereditary monarch relies on pomp and ceremony, which enhance the respect for the institution
  • To improve something by adding features.
  • * 1986 , Maggie Righetti, Knitting in Plain English , page 192
    • A pom-pom to top off a stocking cap, a fringe to feather the edge of a shawl, tassels to define the points of an afghan, these are just a few of the delightful little goodies that enhance handknit things.
  • To be raised up; to grow larger.
    • A debt enhances rapidly by compound interest.

    Synonyms

    * See also