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Essential vs Feature - What's the difference?

essential | feature |

As nouns the difference between essential and feature

is that essential is a necessary ingredient while feature is (label) one's structure or make-up; form, shape, bodily proportions.

As an adjective essential

is necessary.

As a verb feature is

to ascribe the greatest importance to something within a certain context.

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.
  • feature

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • (label) One's structure or make-up; form, shape, bodily proportions.
  • * 1596 , (Edmund Spenser), (The Faerie Queene) , IV.ii:
  • all the powres of nature, / Which she by art could vse vnto her will, / And to her seruice bind each liuing creature; / Through secret vnderstanding of their feature .
  • An important or main item.
  • (label) A long, prominent, article or item in the media, or the department that creates them; frequently used technically to distinguish content from news.
  • Any of the physical constituents of the face (eyes, nose, etc.).
  • (label) A beneficial capability of a piece of software.
  • *
  • The cast or structure of anything, or of any part of a thing, as of a landscape, a picture, a treaty, or an essay; any marked peculiarity or characteristic; as, one of the features of the landscape.
  • *
  • (label) Something discerned from physical evidence that helps define, identify, characterize, and interpret an archeological site.
  • A feature' of many Central Texas prehistoric archeological sites is a low spreading pile of stones called a rock midden. Other ' features at these sites may include small hearths.
  • (label) Characteristic forms or shapes of a part. For example, a hole, boss, slot, cut, chamfer, or fillet.
  • Synonyms

    * See also

    Derived terms

    * featural * feature article

    Verb

    (featur)
  • To ascribe the greatest importance to something within a certain context.
  • To star, to contain.
  • to appear; to make an appearance.
  • * {{quote-news
  • , year=2009 , date=November 27 , author= , title=Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child has 'best guitar riff' , work=BBC citation , page= , passage=Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love, Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water and Layla by Derek and the Dominos also featured in the top five. }}