- having the component parts closely compacted together; crowded or compact: a dense forest; dense population.
- stupid; slow-witted; dull.
- intense; extreme: dense ignorance.
- relatively opaque; transmitting little light, as a photographic negative, optical glass, or color.
- difficult to understand or follow because of being closely packed with ideas or complexities of style: a dense philosophical essay.
- Mathematics. of or relating to a subset of a topological space in which every neighborhood of every point in the space contains at least one point of the subset.
Origin of dense
SynonymsSee more synonyms for dense on Thesaurus.com
Examples from the Web for densely
In its own weird way, by the end, The Colbert Report was as densely serialized as Lost.The End of Truthiness: Stephen Colbert’s Sublime Finale
December 19, 2014
Densely populated and impoverished, the community was struggling long before Ebola arrived.Meet the Liberian Girls Beating Ebola
October 29, 2014
And the reasons for that suggest just how densely complicated the Mideast quagmire has become.Obama’s Arab Backers May Draw the U.S. Deep Into the Mideast Quagmire
September 25, 2014
In the mid-20th century, the 15.5-acre island had become the most densely populated place on Earth.Japan's James Bond Villain Ghost Town
August 7, 2014
New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation.A Mob-Defying Former Mayor Knows Why New Jersey Is So Corrupt
February 13, 2014
They were densely crowded aft, and swarmed upon the poop-deck like bees.The Uncommercial Traveller
Sometimes they were near the densely wooded shore, sometimes in the center of the river.One Day's Courtship
There was a ravine at some little distance from it, densely clothed with forest.
Of this art as a whole, the colored women are densely ignorant.
It is frequently found on logs and is then densely imbricated.The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise
M. E. Hard
- thickly crowded or closely seta dense crowd
- thick; impenetrablea dense fog
- physics having a high density
- stupid; dull; obtuse
- (of a photographic negative) having many dark or exposed areas
- (of an optical glass, colour, etc) transmitting little or no light
Word Origin and History for densely
early 15c., from Middle French dense and directly from Latin densus "thick, crowded; cloudy," perhaps from PIE root *dens- "dense, thick" (cf. Greek dasus "hairy, shaggy"). Sense of "stupid" is first recorded 1822.