Necessity

Noun

 * 1) The quality or state of being necessary, unavoidable, or absolutely requisite; inevitableness; indispensableness.
 * 2) The condition of being needy or necessitous; pressing need; indigence; want.
 * 3) That which is necessary; a necessary; a requisite; something indispensable; -- often in the plural.
 * Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive. - Tenzin Gyatso
 * 1) That which makes an act or an event unavoidable; irresistible force; overruling power; compulsion, physical or moral; fate; fatality.
 * 2) The negation of freedom in voluntary action; the subjection of all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, to inevitable causation; necessitarianism.

Antonyms

 * contingency
 * possibility
 * luxury

Derived terms

 * make a virtue of necessity

Related terms

 * necessary
 * necessariness


 * necessitate
 * necessitation


 * necessitousness
 * necessitude

Thesaurus
absolute certainty, absoluteness, act of God, assurance, assuredness, bare cupboard, bare necessities, bare subsistence, beggarliness, beggary, call, call for, cause, certain knowledge, certainness, certainty, certitude, coaction, coercion, compulsion, compulsiveness, condition, constraint, dead certainty, decree, definiteness, demand, demand for, deprivation, desideration, desideratum, destitution, determinacy, determinateness, duress, empty purse, enforcement, essential, essentials, exigency, fate, fatefulness, force majeure, forcing, foredestiny, foregone conclusion, foreknowledge, foreordination, grinding poverty, gripe, hand-to-mouth existence, homelessness, impoverishment, indefeasibility, indigence, indispensable, indispensableness, ineluctability, inerrability, inerrancy, inescapableness, inevasibleness, inevitability, inevitable accident, inevitableness, inexorability, infallibilism, infallibility, inflexibility, irresistibility, irrevocability, lack, mendicancy, moneylessness, must, must item, necessaries, necessities, necessitousness, need, need for, needfulness, neediness, nonambiguity, noncontingency, obligation, obligement, occasion, pauperism, pauperization, penury, pinch, positiveness, predestination, predetermination, preordination, prerequirement, prerequisite, prescience, privation, probatum, proved fact, relentlessness, requirement, requisite, requisiteness, requisition, restraint, sine qua non, sureness, surety, the necessary, the needful, truth, unambiguity, unavoidable casualty, unavoidableness, uncontrollability, undeflectability, unequivocalness, univocity, unmistakableness, unpreventability, unyieldingness, vis major, want

Etymology
< necessite: <  necessite: <  necessitas: < necesse:; see necessary.

Translations

 * Czech:
 * Finnish: tarpeellisuus, välttämättömyys, korvaamattomuus
 * Italian:
 * Kurdish:
 * Kurdish:


 * Portuguese:
 * Scottish Gaelic:
 * Spanish:
 * Telugu: అవసరం (avasaram)


 * Armenian:
 * Czech:
 * Finnish: tarve, puute, puutteenalaisuus, puutteellisuus


 * Kurdish:
 * Scottish Gaelic: ,


 * Finnish: tarve, tarvike, tarvekalu, välttämättömyystarvike
 * Kurdish:
 * Portuguese:


 * Telugu: అవసరం (avasaram)
 * Urdu:


 * Finnish: välttämättömyys, väistämättömyys, kohtalo


 * Portuguese:


 * Finnish: välttämättömyys, väistämättömyys, pakko


 * : nécessité
 * : Notwendigkeit
 * : necessità
 * : 必要 (ひつよう rom hitsuyou); 入用 (いりよう rom iriyou)
 * : förnödenhet

Anagrams

 * cysteines