dense
[dens]
- having the component parts closely compacted together; crowded or compact: a dense forest; dense population.
- stupid; slow-witted; dull.
- intense; extreme: dense ignorance.
- relatively opaque; transmitting little light, as a photographic negative, optical glass, or color.
- difficult to understand or follow because of being closely packed with ideas or complexities of style: a dense philosophical essay.
- 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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Origin of dense
1590–1600; < Latin dēnsus thick; cognate with Greek dasýs
Synonyms
See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com1. congested, crammed, teeming; impenetrable.
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Examples from the Web for denser
Contemporary Examples
The plot of the film runs secondary to the spectacle, and is denser than a TED conference.
‘Interstellar’ Is Wildly Ambitious, Very Flawed, and Absolutely Worth SeeingMarlow Stern
November 7, 2014
PHA, on the other hand, is denser than water, and thus sinks to the bottom.
The stories are denser and the first seven episodes are their own arc.
Denser places with bigger cities are, to put it simply, richer.
Denser cities grow faster for reasons that Jane Jacobs, Robert Lucas, Edward Glaeser, and I have identified.
Historical Examples
What would crush a swift-thinking man is upborne by the denser tide.
Weighed and WantingGeorge MacDonald
Along the denser shadows the three crept to a position in the rear of the natives.
The Monster MenEdgar Rice Burroughs
A shoot of gold which is darker and denser than the rest is called adamant.
TimaeusPlato
Neptune is denser than Saturn, which, by the hypothesis, it ought not to be.
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. IHerbert Spencer
Denser and denser grew the gloom, and now there was a roaring as of a great wind.
The Trail of '98Robert W. Service
dense
- thickly crowded or closely seta dense crowd
- thick; impenetrablea dense fog
- physics having a high density
- stupid; dull; obtuse
- (of a photographic negative) having many dark or exposed areas
- (of an optical glass, colour, etc) transmitting little or no light
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Word Origin
C15: from Latin densus thick; related to Greek dasus thickly covered with hair or leaves
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Word Origin and History for denser
dense
adj.
early 15c., from Middle French dense and directly from Latin densus "thick, crowded; cloudy," perhaps from PIE root *dens- "dense, thick" (cf. Greek dasus "hairy, shaggy"). Sense of "stupid" is first recorded 1822.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper