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

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

Etymology

Origin of dense

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

Example Sentences

Brown’s 2021 visit to Africa’s central spot, in the Central African Republic, required hiring a helicopter and bringing along a few machine-gun-toting government soldiers so he could shoulder through dense jungle to the appointed coordinates.

From The Wall Street Journal

On the outside, a whole head of cabbage is dense, firm and undeniably heavy.

From Salon

Instead of looking directly for faint starlight, they searched for tight groupings of globular clusters, which are dense, spherical collections of stars that typically orbit galaxies.

From Science Daily

In contrast, the mantle is a thick layer of warm, dense rock that behaves more like a slow moving solid and extends about 1,800 miles deep, making up most of the planet's interior.

From Science Daily

Requirements to clear vegetation around homes, including the state’s upcoming Zone Zero regulations, are not enough to meaningfully reduce wildfire risk in the Palisades, with its steep topography and dense vegetation, the resiliency report found.

From Los Angeles Times

Related Words

• heavy
• impenetrable
• opaque
• solid