Home / Words / condenseNo. 0056

condense

/kənˈdens/·verb

to change from vapour into liquid; to make denser or more concise
Fig. 1 — The kettle has been at it for a minute, and the cold window above it starts collecting what the air can no longer hold.
01Definition

To condense is to make dense: to take something spread thin and gather it into less space. Steam meeting a cold window condenses — the invisible vapour gives up its room and reappears as water you can see, beading on the glass. A writer condenses a report the same way, pressing forty loose pages into five that carry all the weight. From Latin densus, 'thick'. Where compress forces things smaller from outside, condensing is a settling into denser form — the cloud becoming the drop.

02In use
  • iOvernight, moisture in the warm air condenses on the cold glass as beads of water.
  • iiShe condensed the committee's eighty-page findings into a two-page brief.
  • iiiThe documentary condenses a century of polar exploration into fifty minutes.
03Collocations
  • condense into droplets
  • water vapour condenses
  • condense a report
  • condensed milk
  • condense an argument

Family condensation (noun) · condensed (adjective) · condenser (noun)

04Relations

=compress, concentrate, distill, abridge, shorten

≠evaporate, expand, dilute

06TOEFL & IELTS

Double duty in both exams. In science passages it is the water cycle's hinge: vapour rises, cools and condenses — the exact partner of evaporate, and a pairing worth stating cleanly in Task 1 process diagrams. In study skills it is what you do to sources: the TOEFL integrated task effectively asks you to condense a lecture without distorting it. Condensation names both the droplets on the window and the act of shortening a text. Keep it apart from compress: pressure applied from outside versus a settling into denser form.

07Asked
What is the difference between condense and evaporate?
They are the two directions of the same door. Evaporate: liquid gains heat and escapes as vapour. Condense: vapour loses heat and returns to liquid. The water cycle runs on the pair — oceans evaporate, clouds form where the vapour condenses, rain closes the loop — and Task 1 process diagrams reward stating the two verbs cleanly as opposites.
What causes condensation on windows?
Air holds an invisible budget of water vapour, and the budget shrinks as air cools. Wherever warm, moist air touches a surface cold enough to push it past that limit — its dew point — the excess has nowhere to stay airborne and lands as liquid. The scene above stages it: the kettle loads the air, the cold pane presents the bill.
What is the difference between condensation, condensate and condensing?
Condensation is the process (and, loosely, the misted result on your window). Condensate is the engineer's word for the liquid itself — the collected drops a power plant or air conditioner drains away. Condensing is the participle, common as a label: a condensing boiler is one that recovers extra heat by condensing its own exhaust steam.
What is condensed milk, and how is it different from evaporated milk?
Both are milk with much of the water boiled off — condensed into a can. The difference is sugar: condensed milk is heavily sweetened, thick as syrup, and the sugar itself preserves it; evaporated milk is unsweetened and sterilised by heat instead. Recipes are strict about the distinction, and so are reading passages on food processing.
What does it mean to condense a report or an essay?
To carry the whole argument in fewer words — forty pages become five, and nothing essential is missing, only the slack. That differs from summarising, which strips a text to its main points and accepts the loss of detail. A condensed version still works as the document; a summary only tells you about it.
Is condense the same as compress?
Close but not identical: compress squeezes from outside, condense settles into denser form from within. The compress entry on this site draws the full line between them; the short version is that pistons compress and vapour condenses.
Does condense need an object?
It works both ways. Transitive: you condense a report, and cooling condenses steam back to water. Intransitive: vapour condenses on the glass all by itself — no one condenses it. Science writing mostly uses the intransitive pattern (moisture condenses, clouds condense), study-skills writing the transitive one, so both constructions are worth commanding.