Language Of Confusion: Date With Density

Another breather episode. I’m sure I’ll have a nice long series ready to go next week.
 
As the title indicates, this week we’re looking at the word dense. It showed up in the early fifteenth century from the classical Latin densus, which also just means dense. Before that, it’s not really known. One possibility is that it’s from the Greek word dasys, which means shaggy, either in a hairy sense or thick with leaves. Fun fact is dense started to mean difficult to penetrate in 1732 (which makes sense, dense things are tough to get through), and then started to mean stupid in 1822. Because dense people are also difficult to get through.
 
Density showed up after dense, in the seventeenth century. It actually comes form the French word densité, which means density of course, from the Old French dempsité, and that’s from the classical Latin densitas, density. And you know that’s from densus, so these words have been very consistent.
 
Condense showed up in the early fifteenth century—condensation two hundred years later in the seventeenth. It’s from the Old French condenser, a mix of the prefix com- (although that’s just an intensifier here) and the Latin densare, to thicken, from densus. To condense is to really thicken something—like thickening the air so much it turns into water! Not really how it works, but you can see how the thought line went.
 
And that’s it, all the dense words. Short and sweet. Maybe even a little thick.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center