Oxford English and Spanish Dictionary, Synonyms, and Spanish to English Translator

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Meaning of dense in English:

dense

Pronunciation /dɛns/

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adjective

1Closely compacted in substance.
‘as the storm cleared, a dense fog came down’
- ‘Then it's sent to a bale press, which compresses loose cotton into compact, dense bales.’
- ‘Rugosa roses make up a dense, compact hedge at the end of the garden without distracting from the sea view.’
- ‘The long DNA chain is naturally compacted in a dense form in most biological systems.’
- ‘Furthermore, in cultivated soils, dense compact subsoils frequently underlie the loosened topsoil.’
- ‘He said that pasta's dense, compact nature means that it is digested more slowly than other starches.’
- ‘Although his soundscapes are incredibly dense and compact, his compositions are not as hectic as they might seem.’
- ‘Depleted uranium is an extremely dense substance derived from enriched uranium.’
- ‘A thick, dense cloud of smoke had moved into the streets, making the visibility hard on the roads.’
- ‘The forest was filled with dense fog, so thick that I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of me.’
- ‘The more dense and compacted the snow is the easier it will be to perform slides.’
- ‘In other statements read to the court, neighbours described how they tried to get into the house to pull the children out, but were beaten back by the dense smoke and fierce heat.’
- ‘The fur of sea otters is very dense with an insulating underfur and a layer of long guard hairs over the top which trap a layer of air, adding further to the insulation.’
- ‘They are so dense that a ‘sugar cube’ sized object of neutron star material would weigh as much as all of the people on Earth!’
- ‘Flames are essentially hot gases, and hot things rise because they are less dense than their surroundings.’
- ‘Page's poems have suddenly entered our relationship: the moment is dense with meaning for me.’
- ‘This unusual tail is thick and rounded in appearance, completely covered with extremely dense hair.’
- ‘They create overly dense, complex, and detailed cartoon drawings that seem at once beautiful and menacing.’
thick, heavy, opaque, soupy, murky, smoggy, impenetrable
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1. 1.1Having the constituent parts crowded closely together.
  ‘she made her way through the dense undergrowth’
  ‘It was slow work, for the trees were close, and in places dense with the bare vines and stalks of undergrowth.’
  ‘The very words ‘fruit cake’ suggest a heavy, rich and wintry confection, dense with dried fruits and redolent of brandy.’
  ‘Then you go back to work and suddenly the day is so dense with activity you feel as if you've done three or four days' worth of mindless tearing around in a few hours.’
  ‘I fight past hoods and sleeves to the very back of the closet, where it is dense with obsolete clothing.’
  ‘It is a room dense with ornamentation, small sculptures and carvings.’
  ‘The old indoor market is struggling and its doors are dense with graffiti, like every unwatched surface.’
  ‘The fields, however, are dense with cows and sheep, every one of which will be slaughtered if the disease spreads this far.’
  ‘The roadsides in the burgeoning light are dense with Virginia creeper, and the speeding car shines like molten gold.’
  ‘Amid that sea of sand, islands of forest appear, dense with Sitka spruce and salal and evergreen huckleberry.’
  ‘We believed that there are many ways to be a boy, and we knew as well that manhood should be dense with possibilities and potential.’
  ‘The sky is dense with numbered stars, seen through the cavernous central chamber of an observatory.’
  ‘It seems pointlessly dense with renegade and overlapping wood slats, all cracked and sullied.’
  ‘The content is detailed and dense with data; the approach is innovative and convincing.’
  ‘The show has become so dense with allusions to itself, the story lines so complicated, that no closure is possible within any one episode.’
  ‘As it turns out, your ears are particularly dense with these pressure points.’
  ‘The airspace in which the aircraft is to be operated is dense with other aircraft and restrictions.’
  ‘The hills, so dense with madrone and manzanita they seem canopied in green, echo back.’
  ‘The air was dense with meandering mists that loomed ominously over the surface of the ocean.’
  ‘Not only is it empty, it's just as dense with galaxies as any other era in the history of the universe.’
  ‘Rainfall is heavy, and the area is dense with rain forests with mahogany, teak, and ebony trees.’
  close-packed, closely packed, tightly packed, closely set, thick, packed, crowded, crammed, jammed together, compressed, compacted, compact, solid, tight
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2informal (of a person) stupid.
- ‘Am I being dense? I don't quite understand’
- ‘The American agent looked at Logan as if he were a math teacher trying to explain a simple problem to a dense student.’
- ‘After thinking about it for a while, the rather dense teacher said, ‘yes’.’
- ‘Even a relatively dense dad like myself could sense that something was wrong.’
- ‘He wouldn't know why he was in trouble, he was so dense that way.’
- ‘Jason looked at me as if I was dense, ‘My relatives’ he explained after he got a blank look from me.’
- ‘Anya frowned at the English guy as if he were particularly dense.’
- ‘I know what she's doing but I act like I'm too dense to notice I'm getting the silent treatment.’
- ‘I put on the fakest face, so even my extremely dense dad would notice.’
- ‘I didn't know if he was dense, or just very determined to remain polite.’
- ‘Laurel sighed inwardly at how dense Jesse could be sometimes.’
- ‘Angry mindless drones swarm in and complain about the review because they're too dense to realize it's a joke.’
- ‘Mr. Danielson sighed and spoke as a teacher patiently explaining something to some poor dense child.’
- ‘If the theatre audience is dense and does not applaud, canned applause should stand in, on the ready.’
- ‘He must be the most egotistical, dense guy in the universe!’
- ‘Zimera noticed the tension in the room; even she wasn't dense enough not to notice it.’
- ‘Sometimes I really believed that the guy was dense instead of the genius he was.’
- ‘How in heaven did I end up in love with such a dense guy is a mystery to me.’
- ‘Robert returned the look with one that said he thought his son was incredibly dense for not knowing.’
- ‘Either Meyer is completely dense and unable to understand this material, or he has chosen to lie.’
- ‘Her expression showed she thought she was dealing with someone too dense to understand a simple point.’
stupid, unintelligent, ignorant, brainless, mindless, foolish, slow, slow-witted, dull-witted, witless, doltish, blockish, dunce-like, simple-minded, empty-headed, vacuous, vapid, half-witted, idiotic, moronic, imbecilic, obtuse, bovine, lumpish
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3(of a text) hard to understand because of its complexity of ideas.
‘a dark, dense novel’
- ‘Once you've got past the first layer of the menu system, which uses a screen full of icons, the subsequent menus are dense lists of text.’
- ‘I love the Mahabharata: it's one of the most complex, meaning dense documents ever written.’
- ‘With 650 pages packed with dense text, this is obviously designed for the Christmas market.’
- ‘But the text was so dense and so long that I imagine few people will have read it.’
- ‘The final piece is a blank canvas accompanied by a block of dense text larger than the work itself.’
- ‘I believe the problem was that the paper was dense and hard to understand.’
- ‘From time to time I get complaints that my writing is dense and hard to understand.’
- ‘The prose style is tight, with an occasional touch of humour lurking beneath the dense text.’
- ‘While offering some clever observations, the resulting text is dense and difficult to follow.’
- ‘The text is dense, yet accessible to someone with only a fleeting knowledge of Greek myths.’
- ‘It means it's hardly surprising that, generally, people don't read long, dense texts espousing positions that are the opposite of their own.’
- ‘If you are intelligent and disciplined enough to read dense books, then why do you lack faith in your own abilities to show discipline with a television set?’
- ‘She doesn't tuck clues away in boring thickets of dense verbiage.’
- ‘This book is somewhat dense, but if you like big slabs of no-nonsense political history, it is a feast.’
- ‘Not surprisingly, the book is pretty dense, but it's not impenetrable.’
- ‘At 402 pages of clear type with little white space, this book is extremely dense.’
- ‘The authors of the Enlightenment loved accessible fiction far more than dense treatises.’
- ‘The result is fascinating, but the text is so dense with information that it threatens to be heavy and lugubrious.’
- ‘Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood is melodious, lush, and dense with meaning.’
- ‘Though his novels are full of philosophy and history, they are rarely dense or pretentious.’
impervious, impermeable, solid, dense, thick, hard, unyielding, unbreakable, indestructible, puncture-proof, unpierceable, resistant
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