complete

• compleat (archaic)

From Middle English compleet (“full, complete”), borrowed from Old French complet or Latin completus, past participle of compleō (“I fill up, I complete”) (whence also complement, compliment), from com- + pleō (“I fill, I fulfill”) (whence also deplete, replete, plenty), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁- (“to fill”) (English full).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /kəmˈpliːt/, /kɒmˈpliːt/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /kəmˈpliːt/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -iːt
• Hyphenation: com‧plete

complete (third-person singular simple present completes, present participle completing, simple past and past participle completed)

1. (transitive, intransitive) To finish; to make done; to reach the end.

   Synonyms: accomplish, finish; see also Thesaurus:end

   He completed the assignment on time.

   • 2023, “30 Under 13”, performed by Better Lovers:

     How far are you willing to reach?
     While you're coveting outcomes that you can't achieve
     Now you're on a mission, but you won't complete
     Shouldn't hold on to me, hold on to me
     Try to let go of me, let go of me

2. (transitive) To make whole or entire.

   Synonyms: consummate, perfect, top off

   The last chapter completes the book nicely.

3. (poker) To call from the small blind in an unraised pot.

• This is a catenative verb that takes the gerund (-ing). See Appendix:English catenative verbs

complete (comparative more complete or completer, superlative most complete or completest)

1. With all parts included; with nothing missing; full.

   Synonyms: entire, total; see also Thesaurus:entire

   My life will be complete once I buy this new television.

   She offered me complete control of the project.

   After she found the rook, the chess set was complete.

   • 2012, William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur‎^[1], University of California Press, page 68:

     […] and two enormous Scottish poems, the Buik of Alexander, which has been improbably ascribed to Barbour, and Sir Gilbert Hay's Buik of Alexander the Conquerour; one nearly complete Prose Life of Alexander and fragments of four others; a stanzaic translation of the Fuerres de Gadres which survives only in a fragment, the Romance of Cassamus, and three separate translations of the Secreta Secretorum.

   • 2012 March-April, Terrence J. Sejnowski, “Well-connected Brains”, in American Scientist‎^[2], volume 100, number 2, archived from the original on 27 April 2017, page 171:

     Creating a complete map of the human connectome would therefore be a monumental milestone but not the end of the journey to understanding how our brains work.

2. Finished; ended; concluded; completed.

   Synonyms: concluded, done; see also Thesaurus:finished

   When your homework is complete, you can go and play with Martin.

   • 1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter V, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC:

     In the eyes of Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke the apotheosis of the Celebrity was complete. The people of Asquith were not only willing to attend the house-warming, but had been worked up to the pitch of eagerness. The Celebrity as a matter of course was master of ceremonies.

3. Generic intensifier.

   Synonyms: downright, utter; see also Thesaurus:total

   He is a complete bastard!

   It was a complete shock when he turned up on my doorstep.

   Our vacation was a complete disaster.

4. (mathematical analysis, of a metric space or topological group) In which every Cauchy sequence converges to a point within the space.
5. (ring theory, of a local ring) Complete as a topological group with respect to its m-adic topology, where m is its unique maximal idea.
6. (algebra, of a lattice) In which every set with a lower bound has a greatest lower bound.
7. (mathematics, of a category) In which all small limits exist.
8. (logic, of a proof system of a formal system with respect to a given semantics) In which every semantically valid well-formed formula is provable.^[1]
   • Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that Principia could not be both consistent and complete. According to the theorem, for every sufficiently powerful logical system (such as Principia), there exists a statement G that essentially reads, "The statement G cannot be proved." Such a statement is a sort of Catch-22: if G is provable, then it is false, and the system is therefore inconsistent; and if G is not provable, then it is true, and the system is therefore incomplete.^WP
9. (computing theory, of a problem) That is in a given complexity class and is such that every other problem in the class can be reduced to it (usually in polynomial time or logarithmic space).
   • 2007, Yi-Kai Liu, The Complexity of the Consistency and N-representability Problems for Quantum States, page 17:

     QMA arises naturally in the study of quantum computation, and it also has a complete problem, Local Hamiltonian, which is a generalization of k-SAT.

   • 2009, Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach, page 137:

     BPP behaves differently in some ways from other classes we have seen. For example, we know of no complete languages for BPP.

• incomplete

complete (plural completes)

1. A completed survey.
   • 1994, industry research published in Quirk's Marketing Research Review, Volume 8, p. 125; Research Services Directory Blue Book, published by the Marketing Research Association, p 552; and Green Book, Volume 32, published by the New York Chapter, American Marketing Association, p. 451

     “If SSI says we're going to get two completes an hour, the sample will yield two Qualifieds to do the survey with us.”

   • 2013, Residential Rates OIR webinar published by PG&E, January 31, 2013

     “…our market research professionals continue to advise us that providing the level of detail necessary to customize to each typical customer type would require the survey to be too lengthy and it would be difficult to get enough completes.”

   • 2016, "Perceptions of Oral Cancer Screenings Compared to Other Cancer Screenings: A Pilot Study", thesis for Idaho State University by M. Colleen Stephenson.

     “Don’t get discouraged if you’re on a job that is difficult to get completes on! Everyone else on the job is most likely struggling, and there will be easier surveys that you will dial on.”

• “complete”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “complete”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

• Lecompte

complete (comparative plus complete, superlative le plus complete)

1. complete

• IPA^(key): /komˈplɛ.te/
• Rhymes: -ɛte
• Hyphenation: com‧plè‧te

complete

1. feminine plural of completo

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /komˈpleː.te/, [kɔmˈpɫ̪eːt̪ɛ]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /komˈple.te/, [komˈplɛːt̪e]

complēte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of compleō

• Hyphenation: com‧ple‧te

complete

1. inflection of completar:
   1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
   2. third-person singular imperative

• IPA^(key): /komˈplete/ [kõmˈple.t̪e]
• Rhymes: -ete
• Syllabification: com‧ple‧te

complete

1. inflection of completar:
   1. first/third-person singular present subjunctive
   2. third-person singular imperative