COMPLEMENTAL • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Complemental

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

adjective

Complemental adj.

Supplying, or tending to supply, a deficiency; fully completing. "Complemental ceremony."

Complimentary; courteous. (Obs.)

Complemental air (Physiol.), the air (averaging 100 cubic inches) which can be drawn into the lungs in addition to the tidal air, by the deepest possible inspiration.

Complemental males (Zool.), peculiar small males living parasitically on the ordinary hermaphrodite individuals of certain barnacles.

See images of 'Complemental'

Etymology of 'Complemental'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Complemental" Quotes from Famous Books

... Complemental: applied to sexed forms in the Termitidae, capable of reproduction, but which do not reach the winged stage; the females are less fertile than the forms that become winged and several may be used in one nest to replace a ...

— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... them. When they add themselves to being, they partly redetermine the existent, so that reality as a whole appears incompletely definable unless ideas also are kept account of. This pragmatist doctrine, exhibiting our ideas as complemental factors of reality, throws open (since our ideas are instigators of our action) a wide window upon human action, as well as a wide license to originality in thought. But few things could be sillier than to ignore the prior epistemological ...

— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... ecclesiastical comprehension and conformity. And among the many things we have to be thankful for in our more emancipated and more catholic day, it is not the least that Rutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside one another on the tables of ...

— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte

... mated, their pettinesses and selfishnesses peculiarly complemental. In any case, they ...

— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... accumulating facts and speculating on the subject of variation without having worked out my due share of species." (II. p. 31.) The eight or nine years of labour, which resulted in a monograph of first-rate importance in systematic zoology (to say nothing of such novel points as the discovery of complemental males), left Darwin no room to reproach himself on this score, and few will share his "doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so ...

— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley