dense

[dens]

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.

dense

/ 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

Other Word Forms

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of dense¹

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

Word History and Origins

Origin of dense¹

C15: from Latin densus thick; related to Greek dasus thickly covered with hair or leaves

Example Sentences

“The Declaration’s Journey” is an ambitious show, and its curators and designers have done a canny, mostly successful job of making its dense history digestible.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

The night sky contains remarkably precise "cosmic clocks": pulsars, which are dense neutron stars that emit radio pulses at steady intervals, ticking like perfectly timed metronomes.

Read more on Science Daily

Conditions a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, within dense regions called dark matter halos, appear to have been ideal for forming such stars.

Read more on Science Daily

It rains almost all year round in Mbandaka, the capital of Equateur province in the dense rainforest of the Congo Basin of central Africa.

Read more on Barron's

As it cooled, denser minerals sank to create the mantle, while lighter ones floated upward to form the crust.

Read more on Science Daily

Related Words

• heavy 
• impenetrable 
• opaque 
• solid