dense
Americanadjective
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having the component parts closely compacted together; crowded or compact.
a dense forest;
dense population.
- Synonyms:
- impenetrable, teeming
-
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.
adjective
-
thickly crowded or closely set
a dense crowd
-
thick; impenetrable
a 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
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
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Robert Kaplow's dense and literary script is utterly dominated by Hawke, who told one journalist he had more dialogue in the first 30 minutes of screentime than in the entirety of his last four films.
From Barron's
They found denser patterns on figurines than on tools.
From BBC
Many cells in the body, especially those that line blood vessels, are covered by a dense outer layer called the glycocalyx.
From Science Daily
The theory is that businesses perform better and workers get richer when they are based in big, dense cities, because of the concentration of knowledge.
From BBC
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.
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
