dense
Americanadjective
-
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
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physics having a high density
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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
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
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.
Vocabulary lists containing dense
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
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"The Ravine," Vocabulary from the short story
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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.
See Examples For:
As air-defense networks get more dense and sophisticated, protecting the drones has become a greater obstacle than enabling them to travel far.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 22, 2026
She points to boroughs such as Islington, where high poverty, limited green space, expensive housing and dense populations contribute to particularly low child populations.
From BBC ● Jul. 22, 2026
Protecting the Amazon is crucial to combat climate change, since its dense vegetation absorbs the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
From Barron's ● Jul. 21, 2026
During this phase, their outer layers churn and gradually drift into space, while the dense cores left behind shrink into white dwarfs.
From Science Daily ● Jul. 21, 2026
Using machetes and axes, they cut through the jungle’s dense foliage.
From "Death on the River of Doubt" by Samantha Seiple
This denser network makes the budget airline more attractive to passengers who value flexibility, which could help improve ticket revenues over time, the analysts say.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026
The researchers found that the resulting "avalanche network" of potential failures is approximately four times denser than the underlying physical trade network.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 20, 2026
Fellow economists Marina Gertsberg, Ekaterina Volkova and I found that the disgraced financier effectively wired corporate America into a denser, more tightly interconnected network.
From Salon ● Jun. 20, 2026
A new state law that allows denser housing development near major transit stops goes into effect in July, opening the door to construction of more than 1 million new units in California’s urban centers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 9, 2026
Aristotle took the view that harder substances are denser and heavier than softer substances; it followed that ice is heavier than water.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
Black ones hold crude oil as well as the "heaviest" or densest products like bitumen.
From Barron's ● Apr. 26, 2026
"You have the second densest country in the world, that has virtually uncongested streets," Harvard economist Edward Glaeser said of the city-state.
From BBC ● Mar. 7, 2026
They needed to protect the structural integrity of the skyscraper, which sits on top of the city’s rail lines, so it wouldn’t collapse in the middle of America’s densest office district.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025
Only the smallest, densest regions of the galaxy make it through these battles, leaving the poor galaxy without much fuel for its stellar nurseries — the regions where new stars are born.
From Space Scoop ● May 21, 2025
The earliest and most intensive food production, and the densest populations, of Greater Australia arose in the highland valleys of New Guinea at altitudes between 4,000 and 9,000 feet above sea level.
From "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" by Jared M. Diamond
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.