Complexes

How to spell complexes

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce complexes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does complexes mean?

1. nounGroups of connected buildings or facilities forming single sites.
2. nounSets of unconscious feelings or beliefs that influence a person's behaviour.

Complexes in a sentence

• The city approved two new sports complexes near the river.

• The therapist explored the guilt complexes her client had carried for years.

• Several apartment complexes along the coast were evacuated before the storm.

• Deep-seated inferiority complexes can affect how people behave at work.

Where does complexes come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the plural of the noun complex, which traces back to the Latin complexus, meaning 'an embrace' or 'a connection', the past participle of complectere 'to encircle' or 'to entwine'. That verb was built from com- 'together' and plectere 'to weave, plait or braid', so the core idea is of separate strands knotted into one whole. English first used complex as an adjective in the seventeenth century to describe things made of interwoven parts, and the noun sense for an interconnected group of buildings or ideas grew out of that. The psychological meaning, a tangle of repressed feelings, was popularised through early twentieth-century writing on Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The buried plex root, the same one inside 'plait' and 'perplex', is the spelling trap: the word ends in -plexes, never -plexs, because we add -es after the x sound.

How the word is built

• com- (together)
• plex (from plectere: to weave, braid)
• -es (plural)