Necessity (noun) Definition, Meaning & Examples

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noun, plural ne·ces·si·ties.
  1. something necessary or indispensable: food, shelter, and other necessities of life.
  2. the fact of being necessary or indispensable; indispensability: the necessity of adequate housing.
  3. an imperative requirement or need for something: the necessity for a quick decision.
  4. the state or fact of being necessary or inevitable: to face the necessity of testifying in court.
  5. an unavoidable need or compulsion to do something: not by choice but by necessity.
  6. a state of being in financial need; poverty: a family in dire necessity.
  7. the quality of following inevitably from logical, physical, or moral laws.
Idioms
  1. as an inevitable result; unavoidably; necessarily: Our trip to China must of necessity be postponed for a while.
noun plural -ties
  1. something needed for a desired result; prerequisite
  2. a condition or set of circumstances, such as physical laws or social rules, that inevitably requires a certain result
  3. the state or quality of being obligatory or unavoidable
  4. urgent requirement, as in an emergency or misfortune
  5. poverty or want
  6. compulsion through laws of nature; fate
  7. philosophy
    • a condition, principle, or conclusion that cannot be otherwise
    • the constraining force of physical determinants on all aspects of life
  8. logic
    • the property of being necessary
    • a statement asserting that some property is essential or statement is necessarily true
    • the operator that indicates that the expression it modifies is true in all possible worlds
  9. inevitably; necessarily
Necessity (noun) Definition, Meaning & Examples

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