dense

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English

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia

Etymology

From Middle French dense, from Latin dēnsus, from Proto-Indo-European *dens- (“thick, dense”).

Pronunciation

Adjective

dense (comparative denser, superlative densest)

  1. Having relatively high density.
    Synonym: solid
  2. Compact; crowded together.
    Synonyms: compact, crowded, packed; see also Thesaurus:compact
    Antonyms: diffuse; see also Thesaurus:diffuse
    • 1998, The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia: Knowledge in Depth‎, →ISBN, →OCLC, pages 172, 173:
      The regions of densest population are the tributaries and banks of the Huai above Pang-pu and the diked areas along the right bank of the Yangtze. […]
      There are four large towns—Ho-fei, the capital; Huai-nan; Pang-pu; and Wu-hu.
  3. Thick; difficult to penetrate.
    Synonyms: thick, solid
    Antonym: thin
    • 1881, Ernest William White, Cameos from the Silver-land: Or, The Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Republic, London: J. Van Voorst, page 44:
      ... mantling the slopes are other still denser forests, where the Pacara (Enterolobium timbavica), Lapacho (Tecoma stans), Quina-Quina (Myroxilon peruanum), urunday (allied to the Lapacho) Quefioa (Rosacea Polylepis racemosa), Cascaron ...
    • 1918, W B Maxwell, chapter XIII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
      And Vickers launched forth into a tirade very different from his platform utterances. He spoke with extreme contempt of the dense stupidity exhibited on all occasions by the working classes. He said that if you wanted to do anything for them, you must rule them, not pamper them.
  4. Opaque; allowing little light to pass through.
    Synonyms: cloudy, opaque; see also Thesaurus:opaque
    Antonyms: clear, diaphanous, see-through, translucent, transparent; see also Thesaurus:transparent, Thesaurus:translucent
  5. Obscure, or difficult to understand.
    Synonyms: abstruse, difficult, hard, incomprehensible, obscure, tough; see also Thesaurus:incomprehensible
    Antonyms: clear, comprehensible, easy, simple, straightforward, understandable; see also Thesaurus:comprehensible
  6. (mathematics, topology) Being a subset of a topological space that approximates the space well. See the Wikipedia article on dense sets for a mathematical definition.
    Antonym: meager
  7. Slow to comprehend; of low intelligence. (of a person)
    Synonyms: dumb, slow, stupid, thick; see also Thesaurus:stupid
    Antonyms: bright, canny, intelligent, quick, quick-witted, smart; see also Thesaurus:intelligent
    • 2023 May 16, Cade Metz, “Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:
      There are times when systems like GPT-4 seem to mimic human reasoning, but there are also times when they seem terribly dense. “These behaviors are not always consistent,” Ece Kamar, a Microsoft researcher, said.

Antonyms

Derived terms

Translations

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Translations to be checked

Noun

dense (plural denses)

  1. A thicket.

Anagrams

Esperanto

Etymology

From densa +‎ -e.

Adverb

dense

  1. densely

French

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin dēnsus.

Pronunciation

Adjective

dense (plural denses)

  1. dense

Further reading

Italian

Adjective

dense f pl

  1. feminine plural of denso

Latin

Etymology

From dēnsus (“dense, close, frequent”) +‎ -ē (adverbial suffix).

Pronunciation

Adverb

dēnsē (comparative dēnsius, superlative dēnsissimē)

  1. closely, in rapid succession

References

  • “dense”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • “dense”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
  • dense in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.

Spanish

Verb

dense

  1. third-person plural imperative of dar combined with se
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