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

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

The petition said the "dense" line of bollards had fundamentally changed the character of the historic space.

From BBC • Apr. 18, 2026

When agents moved in perfectly straight paths, they quickly formed dense clusters and traffic jams that halted progress.

From Science Daily • Apr. 15, 2026

“We’re operating in dense cities where new supply is structurally limited,” she says, and with automation, she believes, Stuf can scale up quickly as demand increases.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 15, 2026

Those dense, umami-packed centers become the backbone of the dressing.

From Salon • Apr. 14, 2026

She rarely went out beyond the neighborhood grocers and wasn’t used to such dense crowds.

From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu

Related Words

• heavy
• impenetrable
• opaque
• solid