Sparse is a computer software tool designed to find possible coding faults in the Linux kernel. Unlike other such tools, this static analysis tool was initially designed to only flag constructs that were likely to be of interest to kernel developers, such as the mixing of pointers to user and kernel address spaces.

Sparse may refer to:

• Sparse, a software static analysis tool
• Sparse language, a type of formal language in computational complexity theory
• Sparse matrix, in numerical analysis, a matrix populated primarily with zeros
• Sparse file, a computer file mostly empty