dense

American  

[dens] / dɛns /

adjective

denser, densest

1. having the component parts closely compacted together; crowded or compact.

   a dense forest;

   dense population.

   Synonyms:

   impenetrable, teeming

2. stupid; slow-witted; dull.

3. intense; extreme.

   dense ignorance.

4. relatively opaque; transmitting little light, as a photographic negative, optical glass, or color.

5. difficult to understand or follow because of being closely packed with ideas or complexities of style.

   a dense philosophical essay.

6. Mathematics. of or relating to a subset of a topological space in which every neighborhood of every point in the space contains at least one point of the subset.

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dense British  

/ dɛns /

adjective

1. thickly crowded or closely set

   a dense crowd

2. thick; impenetrable

   a dense fog

3. physics having a high density

4. stupid; dull; obtuse

5. (of a photographic negative) having many dark or exposed areas

6. (of an optical glass, colour, etc) transmitting little or no light

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• nondenseness
  noun
• ultradense
  adjective
• densely
  adverb
• denseness
  noun
• superdense
  adjective

Etymology

Origin of dense

First recorded in 1590–1600; from Latin dēnsus “thick”; cognate with Greek dasýs

Explanation

When woods are dense, the trees grow close together. When fog is dense, you can't see through it. And if someone calls you dense, they think nothing can get into your thick skull. Dense comes from the Latin densus which means thick and cloudy. In general, the word means packed tight and gives the sense that something is difficult to get through. Text can be dense in two different ways: when the words are packed closely together on the page, and when the text is filled with big words and complicated thoughts. Either way, reading dense text is just no fun.

Example Sentences

There is snow on the mountains, dense fog that blankets crops in the fall, giving life to wine-country grapes, fires in the dry season and the occasional earthquake.

From Los Angeles Times • Jun. 8, 2026

SpaceX also needs to work out how to make Starlink more reliable in dense urban environments.

From Barron's • Jun. 7, 2026

Acting like a giant incinerator, the spinning flames destroy many of the particles responsible for dense smoke plumes.

From Science Daily • Jun. 5, 2026

Now, Uber and Autobrains hope to venture into Munich’s dense streets and high-speed road networks—pending regulator approval—saying the German city provides the right environment to launch robotaxis at scale.

From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 1, 2026

And again when I felt the cold metal graze my neck as the barber worked across my dense braid, the grind of the cutting loud in my ear.

From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu

Related Words

• heavy
• impenetrable
• opaque
• solid