Intensive means concentrated, thorough, and requiring a lot of focused effort in a short amount of time. When something is intensive, it demands your full attention and energy.

An intensive training program for basketball might pack six hours of practice into each day for two weeks, working on every skill from dribbling to defense. An intensive care unit in a hospital treats patients who need constant, careful monitoring. An intensive study session means diving deep into your material, examining every detail and making sure you truly understand the concepts.

The word suggests something powerful and demanding. Regular piano practice might be thirty minutes a day, but an intensive piano workshop could mean practicing four hours daily for a week. This concentrated approach can help you improve faster, but it also requires more commitment and stamina.

You might hear about labor-intensive work, meaning tasks that need lots of human effort, like hand-picking strawberries. Or resource-intensive projects that consume significant materials or money. In each case, intensive signals that something requires substantial investment of time, energy, or resources to accomplish properly.