Noun

(priorities)

An item's relative importance.

He set his e-mail message's priority to high.

A goal of a person or an organisation.

She needs to get her priorities straight and stop playing games.

(taxonomy, of a name) A superior claim to use by virtue of being validly published at an earlier date.

*

Neither [Jones] nor I (in 1966) could conceive of reducing our "science" to the ultimate absurdity of reading Finnish newspapers almost a century and a half old in order to establish "priority ."

(obsolete) Precedence; superior rank.

* 1608 , , I. i. 244:

Follow Cominius. We must follow you. / Right worthy you priority.

Noun

(necessities)

The quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-28, author=(Joris Luyendijk)

, volume=189, issue=3, page=21, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly) , title= Our banks are out of control , passage=Seeing the British establishment struggle with the financial sector is like watching an alcoholic […].  Until 2008 there was denial over what finance had become. […]  But the scandals kept coming, […]. A broad section of the political class now recognises the need for change but remains unable to see the necessity of a fundamental overhaul.}}

The condition of being needy or necessitous; pressing need; indigence; want.

That which is necessary; a requisite; something indispensable.

*

Love and compassion are necessities , not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

That which makes an act or an event unavoidable; irresistible force; overruling power; compulsion, physical or moral; fate; fatality.

* 1804 , Wordsworth,

I stopped, and said with inly muttered voice,

'It doth not love the shower, nor seek the cold:

This neither is its courage nor its choice,

But its necessity in being old.

The negation of freedom in voluntary action; the subjection of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, to inevitable causation; necessitarianism.

(legal) Greater utilitarian good; used in justification of a criminal act .

(legal, in the plural) Indispensable requirements (of life).