adjective, dens·er, dens·est.
- 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.
adjective
- 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
adj.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.