complete

See also: completé, complété, and complète

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

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

    Pronunciation

    • (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /kəmˈpliːt/, /kɒmˈpliːt/
    • (General American) IPA(key): /kəmˈpliːt/
    • Audio (US):(file)
    • Rhymes: -iːt
    • Hyphenation: com‧plete

    Verb

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

    1. (ambitransitive) To finish; to make done; to reach the end.
      Synonyms: accomplish, finish; see also Thesaurus:end
      He completed the assignment on time.
      • 1972, Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 18:
        The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading. It is characterized by its special emphasis on time. When reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. He might be allowed fifteen minutes to read this book, for instance—or even a book twice as long.
      • 1981, A Pictorial History of the Republic of China: Its Founding and Development‎[1], volume II, Taipei: Modern China Press, →OCLC, page 416:
        The Tsengwen Reservoir, located at Nanhsi village, Tainan, was completed in 1973.
      • 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.
    4. (informal, chiefly sports) To accomplish every significant achievement within a field.
      • 2023 August 24, Carlos Alberto Colodro, “Magnus Carlsen “completes” chess as he bags World Cup title”, in Chessbase‎[2], archived from the original on 26 October 2026:
        The 32-year-old has won it all, as the World Cup was the one big trophy missing in his cabinet. [...] Carlsen later shared the following GIF on his X account — chess, completed!
      • 2026 April 13, Sead Dedovic, “Novak Djokovic admits he does not feel like he has “completed tennis” yet”, in Tennis World USA‎[3], archived from the original on 19 August 2026:
        ["]I went to four Olympic Games, and for a long time that medal was missing. To win in Paris, at 37, representing Serbia, is without question one of the greatest moments of my career. [...]
        But I don’t feel like I’ve ‘completed’ tennis,” concluded the 24-time Grand Slam champion.
        The Serbian tennis player hopes to break some more records in his career, although there are very few left.
      • 2026 July 22, “The Knowledge; World Cup, Ballon d’Or, Champions League, Euros … has Rodri completed football?”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian‎[4], London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 26 October 2026:
        “Adding the World Cup to his résumé means Rodri has now won the World Cup, the European Championship, the Champions League, and the Ballon d’Or,” writes Owen Bagnall. “Has anyone else ‘completed football’ like this?”
        They have but it’s a small, elite list.

    Usage notes

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

    Conjugation

    Conjugation of complete
    infinitive (to) complete
    present tense past tense
    1st-person singular complete completed
    2nd-person singular complete, completest† completed, completedst†
    3rd-person singular completes, completeth† completed
    plural complete
    subjunctive complete completed
    imperative complete —
    participles completing completed

    † Archaic or obsolete.

    Derived terms

    Translations

    The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
    Translations to be checked

    Adjective

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

    1. With all parts included; with nothing missing; full.
      Synonyms: entire, total, whole; 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[5], 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[6], 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.
    3. (attributive) 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]
    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.

    Antonyms

    Hyponyms

    Derived terms

    Translations

    Noun

    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.”

    References

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

    Further reading

    Anagrams

    Dutch

    Pronunciation

    • IPA(key): /kɔmˈpleː.tə/
    • Audio:(file)
    • Rhymes: -eːtə
    • Hyphenation: com‧ple‧te

    Adjective

    complete

    1. inflection of compleet:
      1. indefinite masculine and feminine singular
      2. indefinite plural
      3. definite

    Interlingua

    Etymology

    From English complete, French complet, Spanish completo and Italian completo, all from Latin complētus.

    Pronunciation

    • IPA(key): /komˈple.te/

    Adjective

    complete (comparative plus complete, superlative le plus complete)

    1. complete

    Verb

    complete

    1. present participle of compler

    Italian

    Pronunciation

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

    Adjective

    complete

    1. feminine plural of completo

    Latin

    Pronunciation

    Verb

    complēte

    1. second-person plural present active imperative of compleō

    Portuguese

    Pronunciation

    • (Brazil) IPA(key): /kõˈplɛ.t͡ʃi/

    • Hyphenation: com‧ple‧te

    Verb

    complete

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

    Spanish

    Pronunciation

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

    Verb

    complete

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