"Essential British/American English"

[Odessa Dawn]

"Cambridge Essential English Dictionary has all the words and phrases that you need to learn in British English. Select "Essential British English" from the list of dictionaries at the top of any page on Cambridge Dictionaries Online to search this dictionary."
Home page of Essential British English Dictionary - Cambridge Dictionaries Online

You can also find in the bar search "Essential American English," but I couldn't upload it since the internet is very slow, sorry.

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"Essential British/American English" Does this mean basic British/American English?
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[Raymott]

Those first two lines read as if they are your opinion, Odessa. But they are not. They need to be quoted.
'Essential', here, seems to mean more than basic, but not comprehensive. Perhaps "Intermediate" might be an appropriate term, though I couldn't tell you if it was upper or lower intermediate. There are lexicophiles here who could probably check my opinion.

 

[Tdol]

"Essential British/American English" Does this mean basic British/American English?

It's a publisher with a product to sell- essential sounds good, as if it contains all you need to know to get going. It's their term and they can define it their way. It seems to be basic- if you search for a word that you'd think of as advanced, it calls it up from the Advanced Dictionary. Logical, for instance, comes from the Essential Dictionary, but philanthropist comes from the Advanced. They use a corpus, so I imagine they're choosing the words found more commonly there for their selection: http://cambridge.org/corpus