complemented

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of complement.

   The crisp acidity of the wine complemented the rich, fatty pork.

   The new wing was complemented by a garden that softened its stark lines.

   Note

   A regular -ed form that does double duty: the simple past (the sauce complemented the fish) and the participle after have or in the passive. The trap is its near-twin complimented. Complement was once also a spelling of compliment, a use now obsolete, so today complemented means completed or well matched, never praised. In the technical sense of switching a value to its opposite, the participle settles into the adjective for the swapped form.

2. 2
   adjective

   Having the complementary configuration, in which each element has been exchanged for its counterpart.

   The routine compares the complemented byte with the original to confirm that every bit was flipped.

   The engineers tested a complemented version of the amplifier, swapping each NMOS transistor for a PMOS one.

   Similarinverted

   Note

   A technical adjective for whatever has had each part swapped for its exact opposite. Examples include flipped bits in a byte, exchanged devices in an amplifier design in David Binkley's Tradeoffs and Optimization in Analog CMOS Design (2008), and the paired halves of a palindrome in Dan Gusfield's Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences (1997). It usually sits before its noun and beside the original it came from. Complementary means fitting together, while complemented names the swapped copy itself.

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