核心畫面

You can picture a space with far too much packed into it: trees growing trunk against trunk, people shoulder to shoulder, no gaps left for air or light to get through. That 'no room left between things' picture is what the word keeps carrying, whether the crowded space is a forest, a jar of air, a page, or a piece of metal.

一塊空間被塞得滿滿的:樹一棵挨著一棵、人一個貼著一個,中間幾乎不剩縫隙,光和空氣都鑽不進去。從這個「東西之間沒有空隙更多收起一塊空間被塞得滿滿的:樹一棵挨著一棵、人一個貼著一個,中間幾乎不剩縫隙,光和空氣都鑽不進去。從這個「東西之間沒有空隙」的畫面出發,被塞滿的東西可以換成霧、換成一頁字、換成一塊金屬裡的物質,甚至換成一個人腦袋裡的訊息量——但那個「擠到沒有空間」的感覺一直都在。

Three branches

空間被塞滿:密集、茂密

這是核心畫面最直接的樣子:可見的東西一個挨一個,中間沒有空隙。

closely packed together · adjective · B1

Made of or containing a lot of things or people that are very close together, with almost no space left between them.

密集的;茂密的

訊息塞太滿:讀不動

從「空間裡塞太多東西」延伸到「句子裡塞太多意思」——擠的不再是樹或人,而是資訊。

packed with information (dense writing) · adjective · C1

Used about writing that is hard to understand because it packs a lot of information into every sentence, or because the language it uses is complicated.

艱澀的;密密麻麻的

腦袋不通:遲鈍

還是「太密以致穿不過去」的畫面,只是這次穿不過去的是理解——像光穿不過濃霧那樣。

slow to understand · adjective · B2

Not able to understand something quickly or easily, when other people around you have already understood it.

遲鈍的;不開竅的

原始詞典資料1 筆記錄

以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。

denselyadv/ˈdɛnsli/

  • 1

    In a dense manner.

    • The forest was densely populated with trees.
    • There are plenty of soldiers in the surrounding Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, the official Chinese name for the region, mounting guard along the nearby border with the DPRK. […] Yanbian, Yanji apart, is one of the least densely populated regions of China outside the high plateau of Tibet and the deserts of Xinjiang.

資料來源:英文維基詞典 English WiktionaryCC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。