complementary
Acting as a complement; making up a whole with something else.
Adjective
- Acting as a complement; making up a whole with something else.
- I'll provide you with some complementary notes to help you study.
- The two business partners had complementary abilities: one had excellent people skills, while the other had a head for figures.
- Using the terminology we introduced earlier, we might then say that black and white squares are in complementary distribution on a chessboard. By this we mean two things: firstly, black squares and white squares occupy...
- Of the specific pairings of the bases in DNA and RNA.
- Pertaining to pairs of properties in quantum mechanics that are inversely related to each other, such as speed and position, or energy and time. (See also Heisenberg uncertainty principle.)
Origin
From complement + -ary. Piecewise doublet of complimentary.
Forms
Related
Derived
anticomplementary complementarily complementariness complementarity enantiocomplementary intercomplementary noncomplementary complementary allophone complementary angle complementary angles complementary antonym complementary colour color complementary distribution complementary DNA complementary function complementary good complementary medicine complementary nondeterministic polynomial complementary region complementary studies
Noun
- A complementary colour.
- One skilled in compliments.
- the hands of the most skilful and cunning complementaries alive - 1600 (first performance), Beniamin Ionson [i.e., Ben Jonson], “Cynthias Reuels, or The Fountayne of Selfe-Loue. […]”, in The Workes of Beniamin Ionson...
- An angle which adds with another to equal 90 degrees.