Complicate

How to spell complicate

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce complicate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does complicate mean?

1. verbTo make something more difficult, involved, or harder to understand.

Complicate in a sentence

• Adding a third bank account will only complicate your monthly budget.

• New visa rules complicate travel plans for the whole team.

Where does complicate come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb complicare, which literally meant 'to fold together' or 'to roll up', built from the prefix com- meaning 'together' and the verb plicare meaning 'to fold'. The same plicare root sits inside a whole family of English words, including 'apply', 'imply', 'reply', and 'pliable', all of which carry a hidden sense of folding or bending. In Latin the literal folding sense gradually took on the figurative idea of things being tangled or intertwined, and from there the modern meaning of making something more involved or harder to deal with developed. English adopted complicate in the early 1600s, at first meaning literally 'folded together' before settling into today's sense of adding difficulty or confusion. Remembering the buried 'plic' (fold) helps explain the single c in the middle and the -ate ending rather than the tempting but wrong -cate spelling.

How the word is built

• com- (together)
• plic (to fold)
• -ate (verb-forming suffix)