Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The state or quality of being complementary.
- noun The proposition that the underlying properties of entities, especially subatomic particles, may manifest themselves in mutually exclusive forms at different times, depending on the conditions of the observation, and that any physical model that describes entities in terms of one form or the other will be incomplete.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The state of being
complementary
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the interrelation of reciprocity whereby one thing supplements or depends on the other
- noun a relation between two opposite states or principles that together exhaust the possibilities
Etymologies
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Examples
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I was so stunned by Oz’z misuse of the term complementarity that I didn’t even notice Gary’s response.
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The word complementarity was coined in 1998 when Sarkisian's predecessor, Robert Kocharian, was elected president to describe the country's policy of staying friends with its military ally, Russia, and the United States, which has a large Armenian diaspora as well as Europe and Iran.
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This is the matter of black hole complementarity, which is that the observers outside and inside a black hole observe the same field amplitudes, but in complementary forms.
The Black Hole War Sean 2008
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OZ: There's a concept called complementarity, just to blown your brain for a second.
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But it's the notion of complementarity that has become particularly important in the current socioeconomic context, which combines a fragile recovery and widespread unemployment
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But it's the notion of complementarity that has become particularly important in the current socioeconomic context, which combines a fragile recovery and widespread unemployment
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Searching for them and working to improve their complementarity is our logical choice of action, when caught in the jaws of IPCC declared needs for action and citizen resistance to change induce by political action.
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It can also block prosecutions by invoking the ICC tenet of "complementarity," which recognizes national courts as having the first call for instituting legal proceedings.
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He defended a sacred "complementarity" of the sexes, essentially relegating women to the service of others and to her own biology, from which she is cautioned not to seek "liberation."
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Decision making (for example, deciding whether we should invest in conservation of area A or area B) may require only estimates of relative gains in represented variation offered by different places (their "complementarity" values).
Biodiversity Faith, Daniel P. 2007
Telofy commented on the word complementarity
See also complementarity.com. Yet it's still mostly in German.
October 2, 2008