intense
- 1Extreme or very high or strong in degree; severe, and sometimes excessive.
Firefighters battled intense flames for most of the night.
The intense cold of the high pass froze the climbers' water bottles solid.
Similarextreme, fierce, severe, acute, powerful
Oppositemild, moderate, slight
Note
Behind this sense of high degree is a Latin picture of stretching: intēnsus meant "strained, stretched tight," and that literal meaning survives in the "tightly drawn" sense. Here the word rates a quality, such as heat, smoke, color or the onset of a monsoon. It compares both ways. Shelley writes of "intenser hues" and Ruskin of the "intensest possible type," while more intense and most intense are equally correct.
- 2Possessing some quality, such as color, flavor, or brightness, to a very high or strong degree.
Ripe blackberries lend the sauce an intense, almost wine-like richness.
Photographers love the late afternoon, when the light turns warm and intense.
Similardeep, vivid, strong, rich, concentrated
Note
Here the strength belongs to the thing rather than to a quality: not intense brightness but intense stars. William Black's yellow stars grow more intense overhead in A Princess of Thule (1873), and Shelley's intense atom glows in Adonais. Light and color are its natural home. Contrast the sense for a quality itself, where intense modifies the heat or cold rather than whatever gives it off.
- 3Of feelings or thoughts, strongly focused and deeply felt; ardent or passionate.
The two scientists shared an intense curiosity about the deep ocean.
An intense grief settled over the town after the news arrived.
Similardeep, profound, passionate, ardent, fervent
Oppositemild, slight, superficial
Note
The focused sense keeps close to Latin intēnsus, "attentive": intense study, intense thought. Milton pictures such thought as cords that must sometimes be slackened, which keeps the image of the tightly drawn sense in view. An older construction takes upon. In Memoirs of a Cavalier, Defoe finds the Elector intense upon strengthening his army, meaning wholly bent on that one aim.
- 4Of a person, highly emotional, earnest or passionate in temperament.
She came across as intense in the interview, leaning forward and answering every question at length.
Friends described the poet as intense, prone to long silences and sudden bursts of feeling.
Similarpassionate, earnest, emotional, fervent, serious
Oppositeeasygoing, relaxed, placid
Note
Said of a person, it names a temperament rather than a passing feeling, and it sits naturally in a portrait: a small, intense man with piercing blue eyes. In 1879 George du Maurier turned it into a joke in Punch. Under the heading "Refinements of Modern Speech," his Fair Æsthetic greets her dinner partner with "Are you Intense?", mocking it as a fashionable catchword.
- 5Drawn tight and under tension; figuratively strained, stressed, or tense.
Negotiations grew intense in the final hour, with neither side willing to give ground.
The atmosphere in the courtroom was intense as the jury filed back in.
Similartense, strained, fraught, heated, charged
Note
The sense nearest the word's origin: Latin intēnsus meant "strained, stretched tight," and here the word still describes something pulled taut. It is also used figuratively, for a negotiation, a room or a silence that feels close to snapping. Its synonyms strained and tense mark the same pull, and the shift from cord to atmosphere is the step that leads toward the word's other senses.
Practice
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Origin
This word came into Late Middle English from Old French intense, or directly from Latin intēnsus ("strained, stretched tight; intense"), the past participle of intendō ("to stretch out, strain"), formed from in- ("within") plus tendō ("to stretch"), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tend- ("to extend, stretch").