Thursday, May 16, 2019

Want vs. need

Want vs. need

In modern America it seems awfully easy to confuse what one wants with what one needs. And so…

To want is to feel need, to crave. Want came to English in 1200 as a noun, meaning insufficiency, shortage, deficiency.

Some near-synonyms include:

To desire to long for something with intensity or ardor.

To wish for  weaker than desire, sometimes referring to an unrealizable longing. 

To crave the strong desire to gratify a physical appetite or urgent need.

To covet  —  to ardently desire.

Though all the above words involve feeling a need, the need isn’t necessarily essential. I may want, desire, wish for, crave, or covet a $3000 guitar, but when it comes down to it, my $250 guitar is doing the job just fine.

To need something is to experience an urgent requirement of something essential. Need appeared in English about the same time as want. It came from early Germanic sources originally meaning violence or force. Need broadened on its way from Old English to Middle English to mean distress, peril, hardship, necessity.

Some near-synonyms include: 

To require — to experience need of something that is indispensable to a particular end or goal.

To lack is to experience an absence or insufficiency of something essential.

I’m still unable to reply to comments on my own blog, so I apologize in advance for not replying to any comments. The people at Blogger/Blogspot  don’t seem to perceive my problem as a need — just a distant & irrelevant want.




Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Webster’s 1959 New World Dictionary of the American Language, & Wordnik.

1 comment:

  1. And, as we know, in the words of that ancient seer, Mick Jagger, you can't always get what you crave, but sometimes you get what you require.

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