essential vs life-or-death

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. 

life-or-death

adj
  • Of critical importance to the success of a particular endeavor. 

  • Having death as a possible or even likely outcome; perilous. 

  • Of critical importance to the survival of a living organism. 

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