dense - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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

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 S {\displaystyle S} {\displaystyle S} of a topological space T {\displaystyle T} {\displaystyle T}, not comparable) Such that its closure in T {\displaystyle T} {\displaystyle T} is T {\displaystyle T} {\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.

having relatively high density

compact; crowded together

thick; difficult to penetrate

obscure, or difficult to understand

Translations to be checked

dense (plural denses)

  1. A thicket.

From densa +‎ -e.

dense

  1. densely

Borrowed from Latin dēnsus.

dense (plural denses)

  1. dense

dense f pl

  1. feminine plural of denso

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

dēnsē (comparative dēnsius, superlative dēnsissimē)

  1. closely, in rapid succession

dense

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