Other forms: denser, densest
Dense means packed tight, with very little space in between. A dense forest you cannot walk through in a straight line, fog so dense the end of the street disappears, a dense little fruitcake that weighs more than it looks.
Dense also describes writing and thought: a dense chapter is heavy going, too many ideas per line. In science it is exact — density is mass divided by volume, so a dense material is heavy for its size, which is why lead sinks and cork floats. Said of a person, dense means slow to catch on; it is mild, but it is not kind. Thick covers some of the same ground in casual speech, but dense is the word for fog, forest, traffic and population.
1adjectivedensePacked closely together, with little space between the parts.~83%
“A dense crowd filled the square in front of the station.”
2adjectivesubstance(of a substance) Heavy for its size.~10%
“Lead is far denser than aluminium.”
3adjectivethought(of writing or thought) Hard to follow because so much is packed into it.~5%
“The second chapter is dense, but it is worth the effort.”
4adjectiveslow(informal, of a person) Slow to understand.~2%
“Don't be dense — she was joking.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: thick
Dense came through Middle French from Latin dēnsus, and behind that a Proto-Indo-European root *dens-, "thick, dense", which also produced Ancient Greek δασύς. The meaning has barely shifted in all that time: packed tight then, packed tight now.
Proto-Indo-European
*dens- — thick, dense
Latin
dēnsus
Middle French
dense
English, today
dense
From Middle French dense, from Latin dēnsus, from Proto-Indo-European dens- (“thick, dense”) (whence also Ancient Greek δασύς).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA