adjective

dense

DEHNS

adjective

Having parts packed closely together; thick or crowded.

"They hiked through dense forest for hours."

"Dense traffic made the commute twice as long."

Difficult to understand because of complexity or heavy detail.

"The textbook chapter was so dense that students had to reread it twice."

Slow to understand things; not very sharp mentally.

"He can be a bit dense when it comes to picking up on hints."

How to Use Dense

Learner’s notes

In plain EnglishPacked tightly together — or, for text and people, hard to get through or slow to understand.

Common pairings

dense forest dense population dense fog

denser comparative, denses plural, densest superlative

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They hiked through _____ forest for hours.

From Latin dēnsus, "thick, dense," from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "thick."

diffuse few and far between scattered sparse rarefied

thin spread widespread destroy rare slender disperse compact

tense sense incense immense offense intense license expense defense nonsense condense dispense

diffuse few and far between scattered sparse rarefied thin spread widespread destroy rare slender disperse