Hi ,
I have searched high and low for rules regarding the correct usage of
“essential to” and “essential for”.
Which is correct?
“English is essential to a career” or “English is essential for a
career”. Please give me as detailed an answer as you can regarding
the usage of “essential to” and “essential for” with some good
examples. Thanks.
regards,
davidmich
Instinctively I would say ‘essential for’. ‘Essential to’, in my mind, would need to be followed by a verb, ie:
“English is essential for a career”
“English is essential to pursuing a career”
thanks San Vito. That sounds right.
What I got from this is: is it intrinsic to it?
Water is essential to life. Water is part of life and not something separate from it.
The saying water is essential for life has more of a connotation that water is not part of life, but something life needs access to.
To be honest I cannot think of a circumstance where one sounds overwhelmingly right and the other sounds totally wrong. It’s about 25 million to 11 million hits in Google books with “essential to” the leader.
Perhaps the answer is:
“To achieve success in your career always be aware of the essentialocity of your English.”
Or maybe essentialness or essentialitude or something.
That doesn’t prove anything though. All that shows is that one construction is used more than the other. The question isn’t whether one is right or wrong, it’s whether or not it’s right within context. The assumption is that they’re both valid forms in themselves, since they make grammatical sense. To ascertain how people are using it in context one must use something more sophisticated than google books.
A corpus search of BNCweb shows that the two most common collocations with ‘essential to’ are ‘understanding’ and success’, both of which are nouns. Also, ‘the’ appears highest overall, so it seems that most of the constructions involved with ‘essential to’ are followed by a noun phrase. You get plenty of verb phrases too, but it is by no means essential for ‘essential to’ to have one. 
‘Essential for’ yields very similar results. So I have to come to the same conclusion as don’t ask, that it’s whatever ‘feels’ right.
Well, no; in that construction, “pursuing” is a gerund, grammatically acting as a noun.
It’s my impression that “essential” is best used with “to” in almost all situations where it’s appropriate. When you say something is essential to another thing, you’re saying that it’s the essence of the other thing. You’re asserting how the first thing is related to the other – thus, “essential to.”
It’s also my impression that “essential” is often misused, as in the quoted example. Look at it this way: what you’re saying above is that English is the essence of pursuing a career, or at least that the idea can be reasonably extended to include it – that without English, what appears to be a career really isn’t. There are many things essential to a career – landing that first job, getting paid for your work, sustained concentration in a single field – but English? Language, even? Nah. I can have a career without ever communicating a single word to another person (and many people would prefer that career).
What is meant by “essential” in sentences like those quoted is better expressed with “indispensable.”
My own sense of it. You’d use essential to when you’re saying something is a necessary part of something else - that a thing couldn’t exist without this. You’d use essential for when you’re saying it’s something a person needs to do something - but the person himself exists without the thing.
Examples:
Eggs are essential to an omelet.
Eggs are essential for a person making an omelet.
Unfortunately, you are not the arbitrator of what words mean. It isn’t misused, you just have an unreasonable expectation of what the word means that is not shared by the majority of people. Words don’t necessarily mean the same thing as their constituent parts. They may have previously, but to insist they do so now is to be factually incorrect.
And, no, this is not a prescriptivist vs. descriptivist debate. There is no such debate–both are necessary. the debate is over how often a word must be used “incorrectly” before one must abandon the previous rule. Most seem to agree that a definition used since the sixteenth century and has become the most popular usage does not qualify as a mistake.
This reads like a ‘‘style guide’’ question if the phrase is to be written. I the absence of some other specified style guide The Chicago Manual of Style - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia is often considered a first choice.
In spoken usage, you and your audience should be the arbitrators.
Thank you all for you responses. Can anyone quote from any strict rule regarding the usage of “essential to” or “essential for”. So far I have not seen any style guides mentioning such rules. Although I do think many of the answers above are valid, I would like to find a published source (a quotation will do) for the any of the above answers. Thanks.
davidmich