Word.ws English Dictionary

dense

UK/ˈdɛns//ˈdɪns/

dense adjective: having relatively high density.

Adjective

dense (comparative denser, superlative densest)

  1. Having relatively high density.
    Synonyms:
    solid
  2. Compact; crowded together.
    • 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.1998, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia: Knowledge in Depth, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 172, 173
  3. Thick; difficult to penetrate.
    • ... 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 ...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
    • 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.1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XIII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    thick, solid
    Antonyms:
    thin
  4. Opaque; allowing little light to pass through.
  5. Obscure or difficult to understand.
    • 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...2025 April 6, 31:34 from the start, in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 12, episode 7, spoken by John Oliver, published 7 April 2025, retrieved 14 Apr 2025
  6. (not comparable) Such that its closure in T is T.
    Antonyms:
    meager
  7. Slow to comprehend; of low intelligence. (of a person)
    • 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.2023 May 16, Cade Metz, “Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Noun

dense (plural denses)

  1. A thicket.

dense meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

dense in Hindi

having relatively high density
घना ghanā

dense in Tamil

அடர்ந்த, அடர்த்தியான

dense in Marathi

dense, thickheaded
मूर्ख mūrkha

dense in Urdu

having relatively high density
گهنا ghanā
More languagesFewer languages
dense in Bengali
ঘন ghon
dense in Telugu
దట్టమైనది
dense in Malayalam
ഘന ghana
dense in Kannada
ಹೆಡ್ಡ, ಗಾಂಪ, ದಟ್ಟ, ಪಪ್ಪುಕ
dense in Punjabi
ਸੰਘਣਾ saṅghṇā
dense in Gujarati
ગાઢ
dense in Sanskrit
निरन्तर nirántara, निबिड nibiḍa, स्थूल sthūlá, खर khara
dense in Pashto
ټينګ ṭing, ګڼ gëṇ
dense in Arabic
كَثِيف kaṯīf, غَلِيظ ḡalīẓ
dense in Malay
padat, tebal
dense in Persian
چگال čegâl, غلیظ ġaliz
dense in Thai
แน่น nɛ̂n, ทึบ tʉ́p
dense in Vietnamese
đặc, dày đặc, chặt, dày
dense in Myanmar
ထူ htu

Examples of dense in a sentence

  • The British Shorthair has a distinctively chunky body, dense coat and broad face.
  • Amid the flutters of sunshine drifting through the dense canopy, I spotted my target.
  • I wish these lawyers would give us a plain English summary of their dense legalese.

All 40 example sentences with dense

Synonyms of dense

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

10 more antonymsFewer antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of dense

Forms of dense

Adjective
comparativedenser
superlativedensest
Noun
pluraldenses

Origin of dense

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

Words formed from dense

Phrases with dense

Words that rhyme with dense

16 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about dense

What does dense mean?
Dense means having relatively high density.
What is dense in Hindi?
Dense in Hindi is घना (ghanā). See Dense meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is dense?
Dense can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce dense?
Dense is pronounced /ˈdɛns/ (UK).

Words near dense in the dictionary

  1. DENR
  2. Denruyter
  3. dens
  4. dens invaginatus
  5. dens of iniquity
  6. dense
  7. dense array
  8. dense arrays
  9. dense blazingstar
  10. dense blazingstars
  11. Dense Pack

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dense (page history and authors); dense (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); मूर्ख (Marathi) (page history and authors); dense (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); ഘന (Malayalam) (page history and authors); dense (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ਸੰਘਣਾ (Punjabi) (page history and authors); dense (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); खर (Sanskrit) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-dense.ogg.

Cite this entry: “dense.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dense. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.