English

Alternative forms

• compleat (archaic)

Verb

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

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

   He completed the assignment on time.

2. (transitive) To make whole or entire.

   The last chapter completes the book nicely.

Usage notes

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

Synonyms

• accomplish
• finish

Translations

Adjective

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

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

   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 March-April, Terrence J. Sejnowski, “Well-connected Brains”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, 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.

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

   • 1898, Winston Churchill, chapter 5, in The Celebrity:

     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.

   He is a complete bastard!‎

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

   Our vacation was a complete disaster.‎

4. (analysis, Of a metric space) in which every Cauchy sequence converges.
5. (algebra, Of a lattice) in which every set with a lower bound has a greatest lower bound.
6. (mathematics, Of a category) in which all small limits exist.
7. (logic, of a proof system of a formal system)   With respect to a given semantics, that any well-formed formula which is (semantically) valid must also be 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
8. (computing theory) With respect to a complexity class, used of a problem that is in that class and such that every other problem in that 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 and 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.

Synonyms

• (with everything included): entire, total
• (finished): done

Antonyms

• incomplete

Derived terms

Translations

External links

• complete in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• complete in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

References

1. ↑ Sainsbury, Mark [2001] Logical Forms : An Introduction to Philosophical Logic. Blackwell Publishing, Hong Kong (2010), page 358.

Statistics

Interlingua

Adjective

complete ‎(comparative plus complete, superlative le plus complete)

1. complete

Italian

Adjective

complete f pl

1. feminine plural of completo

Latin

Verb

complēte

1. second-person plural present active imperative of compleō

Portuguese

Verb

complete

1. first-person singular present subjunctive of completar
2. third-person singular present subjunctive of completar
3. first-person singular imperative of completar
4. third-person singular imperative of completar

Spanish

Verb

complete

1. Formal second-person singular (usted) imperative form of completar.
2. First-person singular (yo) present subjunctive form of completar.
3. Formal second-person singular (usted) present subjunctive form of completar.
4. Third-person singular (él, ella, also used with usted^?) present subjunctive form of completar.