essential vs vital

essential

adj
  • Very important; of high importance. 

  • Necessary. 

  • Necessary for survival but not synthesized by the organism, thus needing to be ingested. 

  • Being in the basic form; showing its essence. 

  • Really existing; existent. 

  • Having the nature of essence; not physical. 

  • 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. 

  • Idiopathic. 

noun
  • A necessary ingredient. 

  • A fundamental ingredient. 

vital

adj
  • Very important. 

  • Invigorating or life-giving. 

  • Containing life; living. 

  • Necessary to continued existence. 

  • Necessary to the continuation of life; being the seat of life; being that on which life depends. 

  • Capable of living; in a state to live; viable. 

  • Relating to the recording of life events. 

  • Relating to, or characteristic of life. 

How often have the words essential and vital occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )