necessary

1. 1.

   anything indispensable

   “food and shelter are necessities of life”

   “the essentials of the good life”

   “allow farmers to buy their requirements under favorable conditions”

   “a place where the requisites of water fuel and fodder can be obtained”

   Synonymsnecessityessentialrequirementrequisite

   Broaderthing

   Narrowerdesideratummustneed

Other forms of necessary

plural

necessaries·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about necessary

What does necessary mean?

necessary means "absolutely essential". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in necessary?

necessary has 4 syllables: nec-es-sar-y. The stress falls on "nec". In IPA it is /ˈnɛsəˌsɛɹi/.

What is another word for necessary?

Close synonyms include necessity, essential, requirement, requisite. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

What is the opposite of necessary?

The recorded antonyms are unnecessary.

Is necessary a common word?

necessary is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with necessary?

4 words rhyme with necessary. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.