Tiheä

Tiheä is a Finnish adjective meaning dense or thick, used to describe things that have little space or gaps between parts, or that are closely packed. It can refer to physical properties, such as a dense forest (tiheä metsä) or dense fog (tiheä sumu), as well as to figurative density, for example a densely populated area or densely written text.

In Finnish, tiheä inflects like other adjectives to agree with noun in number and case. The base form is tiheä; the genitive singular is tiheän; the partitive singular is tiheää; the nominative plural is tiheät; the partitive plural is tiheitä. The adverbial form is tiheästi, meaning densely.

Semantically, tiheä is used for physical closeness or compactness, but it can also describe non-physical density, such as a high density of population, information, or vegetation. It often appears in contrast to harva, the opposite meaning sparse or thin.

Etymologically, tiheä is a native Finnish word built on the stem tihe- with the standard adjective suffix -ä. The related noun tiheys captures the abstract sense of density or thickness.

Common related terms include tiheys (density, thickness) and tiheästi (densely). The concept is frequently applied in geography, ecology, linguistics (dense prose), and everyday descriptions of physical space.