necessity

I

(New American Roget's College Thesaurus)

I

n. need (see necessity); compulsion; poverty.

II

What must happen

Nouns

1. necessity, necessitation, obligation, compulsion, subjection; needfulness, essentiality, indispensability; dire or cruel necessity, inexorable fate; what must be; force majeure.

2. requirement, need, want, requisite, demand; urgency, exigency; bread and butter, breath of life; sine qua non, matter of life and death; stress, pinch. See certainty, poverty, desire.

3. destiny, fatality, foredoom, foreordination.

4. reflex, reaction, automatic response; recoil.

5. Fates, Parcae, three Sisters, book of fate; God's will, will of heaven, will of Allah; wheel of fortune; Hobson's choice; last shift or resort.

Verbs

1. lie under a necessity; be doomed or destined, be in for, be under the necessity of, have no choice or alternative, cannot [help] but, have one's back to the wall, be driven into a corner; burn one's bridges or boats. Informal, take it or leave it.

2. necessitate, demand, require, call for, entail; must; destine, doom, foredoom, predestine, preordain; compel, force, oblige, constrain.

Adjectives

1. necessary, needful, required, requisite, essential, imperative, indispensable, in demand; compulsory, obligatory, uncontrollable, inevitable, unavoidable, irresistible, irrevocable, inexorable, ineluctable; urgent, exigent, pressing, crying; instant.

2. fated, destined, preordained, fateful, doomed; hooked (see habit).

3. involuntary, instinctive, automatic, blind, mechanical, unconscious, unwitting, unthinking, impulsive. Informal, knee-jerk.

Adverbs — necessarily, of necessity, of course, needs must, perforce, willing or unwilling, willy-nilly, compulsorily; like it or not.

Phrases — any port in a storm; beggars can't be choosers; necessity is the mother of invention; sink or swim.

Quotations — Necessity never made a good bargain (Benjamin Franklin), The superfluous, a very necessary thing (Voltaire), Necessity knows no law (Publilius Syrus), The true creator is necessity, which is the mother of our invention (Plato), I know this — a man got to do what he got to do (John Steinbeck), Great necessities call out great virtues (Abigail Adams).

Antonyms, see will, choice.

II

(Roget's IV) n.

1. [The state of being required]

Syn. need, compulsion, constraint, pressure, obligation, needfulness, essentiality, indispensability, undeniability, requisiteness, prerequisiteness; see also need 3 , requirement 2 .

2. [That which is needed]

Syn. need, want, requisite, vital part, essential, demand, imperative, fundamental, claim, exaction, desideratum, must*; see also lack 2 , need 3 , requirement 2 .

3. [The state of being forced by circumstances]

Syn. exigency, pinch, stress, urgency, extremity, destitution, privation, obligation, inexorableness, inescapableness, case of life or death; see also emergency , poverty 1 , 2 .

See Synonym Study at need .

• of necessity,

Syn. inevitably, importantly, surely; see necessarily .

III

(Roget's 3 Superthesaurus) n.

must, essential, vital component, requirement, obligation, requisite, prerequisite, need, want, basic, fundamental, dire necessity, exigency.

ANT.: extra, luxury, inessential

IV

(Roget's Thesaurus II) noun 1. That which provides a reason or justification: call, cause, ground (often used in plural), justification, occasion, reason, wherefore, why. Idiom: why and wherefore. See START. 2. Something indispensable: condition, essential, must, need, precondition, prerequisite, requirement, requisite, sine qua non. See NECESSARY. 3. A condition in which something necessary or desirable is required or wanted: exigence, exigency, need. See NECESSARY.