# dense

Pronunciation: say "DENS" /dɛns/

## Adjective

1. Compact and tightly crowded together into a small space.
   - Simple: Packed closely together, with little space between things.
   - _The city's dense neighborhoods pack thousands of people into a few blocks._
   - _Mangrove roots grow so dense that boats cannot pass between them._
2. Having a comparatively high density, with much mass contained in a small volume.
   - Simple: Heavy for its size, with a lot of material packed into a small space.
   - _Neutron stars are extraordinarily dense, packing huge mass into a tiny sphere._
   - _Lead is denser than aluminum, so equal volumes differ greatly in weight._
3. Thick enough to be difficult to see through or pass through.
   - Simple: So thick that it is hard to see or move through.
   - _A dense fog settled over the harbor, halting all the boats._
   - _The explorers hacked their way through dense jungle for days._
4. Difficult to understand because of its complexity or tightly packed ideas.
   - Simple: Hard to understand because it is full of complicated ideas.
   - _Her dense philosophical prose demanded several careful rereadings._
   - _The contract's dense legal language confused even the lawyers._
5. Slow to understand things; lacking quickness of mind.
   - Simple: Slow to understand things, and not quick to learn.
   - _Even after the third explanation, he stayed too dense to follow the plan._
   - _She called herself dense for missing such an obvious clue._
6. Allowing little light to pass through; nearly opaque.
   - Simple: So thick that almost no light can pass through.
   - _A dense layer of cloud kept the whole valley in shadow._
   - _Photographers fit a dense filter to cut the light reaching the lens._
7. Of a subset, having a closure equal to the whole space, so its points lie arbitrarily close to every point of the space.
   - Simple: In math, describing a set with members as close as you like to every point of the larger set around it.
   - _The rational numbers are dense in the real numbers._
   - _A set is dense when every open region around any point contains one of its members._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A thicket.

## Origin

From Middle French dense, from Latin dēnsus, which goes back to Proto-Indo-European *dens- ('thick, dense'), the same root that gave Ancient Greek δασύς (dasús).

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/dense (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).