dense

From Middle French dense, from Latin dēnsus, from Proto-Indo-European *dens- (“thick, dense”) (whence also Ancient Greek δασύς (dasús)).

• (Received Pronunciation, US) IPA^(key): /dɛns/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛns

dense (comparative denser, superlative densest)

1. Having relatively high density.

   Synonym: solid

2. Compact; crowded together.

   Synonyms: compact, crowded, packed; see also Thesaurus:compact

   Antonyms: diffuse; see also Thesaurus:diffuse

   • 1998, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia: Knowledge in Depth‎^[1], →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 172, 173:

     The regions of densest population are the tributaries and banks of the Huai above Pang-pu and the diked areas along the right bank of the Yangtze. […]
     There are four large towns—Ho-fei, the capital; Huai-nan; Pang-pu; and Wu-hu.

3. Thick; difficult to penetrate.

   Synonyms: thick, solid

   Antonym: thin

   • 1881, Ernest William White, Cameos from the Silver-land: Or, The Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Republic, London: J. Van Voorst, page 44:

     ... mantling the slopes are other still denser forests, where the Pacara (Enterolobium timbavica), Lapacho (Tecoma stans), Quina-Quina (Myroxilon peruanum), urunday (allied to the Lapacho) Quefioa (Rosacea Polylepis racemosa), Cascaron ...

   • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XIII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     And Vickers launched forth into a tirade very different from his platform utterances. He spoke with extreme contempt of the dense stupidity exhibited on all occasions by the working classes. He said that if you wanted to do anything for them, you must rule them, not pamper them.

4. Opaque; allowing little light to pass through.

   Synonyms: cloudy, opaque; see also Thesaurus:opaque

   Antonyms: clear, diaphanous, see-through, translucent, transparent; see also Thesaurus:transparent, Thesaurus:translucent

5. Obscure or difficult to understand.

   Synonyms: abstruse, difficult, hard, incomprehensible, obscure, tough; see also Thesaurus:incomprehensible

   Antonyms: clear, comprehensible, easy, simple, straightforward, understandable; see also Thesaurus:comprehensible

   • 2025 April 6, 31:34 from the start, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver‎^[2], season 12, episode 7, spoken by John Oliver, published 7 April 2025, retrieved 14 April 2025:

     And if you're experiencing a weird sensation after that clip that you can't quite place, it's because it was nice! It was happy kids talking about how they're able to be themselves, and you don't usually get nice things on this show, which at this point is honestly mainly dense statistics and facts and occasional Pikachu porn!

6. (mathematics, topology, of a subset ${\displaystyle S}$ of a topological space ${\displaystyle T}$, not comparable) Such that its closure in ${\displaystyle T}$ is ${\displaystyle T}$.

   Antonym: meager

7. Slow to comprehend; of low intelligence. (of a person)

   Synonyms: dumb, slow, stupid, thick; see also Thesaurus:stupid

   Antonyms: bright, canny, intelligent, quick, quick-witted, smart; see also Thesaurus:intelligent

   • 2023 May 16, Cade Metz, “Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning”, in The New York Times‎^[3], →ISSN:

     There are times when systems like GPT-4 seem to mimic human reasoning, but there are also times when they seem terribly dense. “These behaviors are not always consistent,” Ece Kamar, a Microsoft researcher, said.

• (antonym(s) of “crowded together”): diffuse, few and far between (of things as opposed to one thing), scattered, sparse, rarefied (scientific, to describe gases)

dense (plural denses)

1. A thicket.

• Denes, Edens, Sneed, denes, edens, needs, sende, sneed

From densa +‎ -e.

• IPA^(key): /ˈdense/
• Rhymes: -ense
• Hyphenation: den‧se

dense

1. densely

Borrowed from Latin dēnsus.

• IPA^(key): /dɑ̃s/

• Audio:

  (file)

dense (plural denses)

1. dense

• condenser
• densité

• “dense”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

dense f pl

1. feminine plural of denso

From dēnsus (“dense, close, frequent”) +‎ -ē (adverbial suffix).

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈdẽː.seː]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈd̪ɛn.se]

dēnsē (comparative dēnsius, superlative dēnsissimē)

1. closely, in rapid succession

• “dense”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “dense”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• dense in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.

dense

1. third-person plural imperative of dar combined with se