complete

present singular third person completes · participle present completing · participle past completed · past completed · first person past singular completed · archaic present second person singular completest · past second person singular completed · archaic past second person singular completedst · present singular third person completes · archaic present singular third person completeth · past singular third person completed · past plural completed · past subjunctive completed · participle present completing · participle past completed · alternative archaic compleat

1. ambitransitiveTo finish; to make done; to reach the end.

   He completed the assignment on time.

   3 more examples

   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.

   1972, Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book, Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 18

   The Tsengwen Reservoir, located at Nanhsi village, Tainan, was completed in 1973.

   1981, A Pictorial History of the Republic of China: Its Founding and Development, volume II, Taipei: Modern China Press, →OCLC, page 416

   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

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

   Synonyms: accomplish, finish, absolve, conclude, consummate, discontinue, do, end

2. transitiveTo make whole or entire.

   The last chapter completes the book nicely.

   Synonyms: consummate, perfect, top off

3. card gamesTo call from the small blind in an unraised pot.
4. informalhobbiesto accomplish every significant achievement within a field

   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!

   2023 August 24, Carlos Alberto Colodro, “Magnus Carlsen “completes” chess as he bags World Cup title”, in Chessbase

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   ["]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 April 13, Sead Dedovic, “Novak Djokovic admits he does not feel like he has “completed tennis” yet”, in Tennis World USA

   “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.

   2026 July 22, “The Knowledge; World Cup, Ballon d’Or, Champions League, Euros … has Rodri completed football?”, in The Guardian, London

comparative more complete · comparative completer · superlative most complete · superlative completest · alternative archaic compleat

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

   She offered me complete control of the project.

   4 more examples

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

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

   […]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, William Matthews, The Tragedy of Arthur, University of California Press, page 68

   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.

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

   Synonyms: entire, total, whole, entire, holo-, one, overall, total

2. Finished; ended; concluded; completed.

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

   1 more example

   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.

   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

   Synonyms: concluded, done, concluded, completed, done, ended, finished, in the books

3. attributiveGeneric intensifier.

   He is a complete bastard!

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

   Our vacation was a complete disaster.

   Synonyms: downright, utter, abject, frightful, absolute, prize, clean, arrant

4. mathematical analysisIn which every Cauchy sequence converges to a point within the space.
5. ring theoryComplete as a topological group with respect to its m-adic topology, where m is its unique maximal idea.
6. algebraIn which every set with a lower bound has a greatest lower bound.
7. mathematicsIn which all small limits exist.
8. human sciencesIn which every semantically valid well-formed formula is provable.
9. computingThat 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).

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

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

   1 more example

   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.

   2007, Yi-Kai Liu, The Complexity of the Consistency and N-representability Problems for Quantum States, page 17

plural completes · alternative archaic compleat

1. A completed survey.

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

   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

   2 more examples

   …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.

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

   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.”