Dense

How to spell dense

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dense

What does dense mean?

1. adjectiveClosely packed together, thick, or crowded; also describing material with a high mass for its size, or by extension a person who is slow to understand.

Dense in a sentence

• The hikers struggled through the dense forest before nightfall.

• A dense fog settled over the motorway and slowed every car.

Where does dense come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin densus, which meant 'thick', 'crowded', or 'packed closely together'. It passed into English in the late 1500s, partly through the French dense and partly straight from the Latin, and from the outset it described things that were closely compacted, such as a forest of trees or a fog so heavy you could barely see through it. From that physical idea of tightly packed matter, scientists later extended it to mean a high amount of mass in a given space, which is why physics still speaks of density. The figurative sense of a person being 'dense', meaning slow to understand, grew naturally from the picture of a thick, impenetrable head. The same densus root also gives us 'condense', literally to thicken something together, and 'density', so the silent-looking spelling with a single s and a final e is shared right across that family.

How the word is built

• dens- (from Latin densus: thick, crowded)
• -e