incomplete

[in-kuhm-pleet]

adjective

1. not complete; lacking some part.

   Synonyms: fragmentary, partial, unfinished

2. Football.,  (of a forward pass) not completed; not caught by a receiver.

3. Engineering.,  noting a truss the panel points of which are not entirely connected so as to form a system of triangles.

4. Logic, Philosophy.

   1. (of an expression or symbol) meaningful only in a specific context.

   2. (of a set of axioms) such that there is at least one true proposition (able to be formulated in terms of the basic ideas of a given system) that is not deducible from the set.

noun

1. Education.,  a temporary grade indicating that a student has not fulfilled one or more of the essential requirements for a course.

   If I don't hand in my term paper for last semester's English course, the professor is going to change my incomplete to an F.

incomplete

/ ˌɪnkəmˈpliːt /

adjective

1. not complete or finished

2. not completely developed; imperfect

3. logic

   1. (of a formal theory) not so constructed that the addition of a non-theorem to the axioms renders it inconsistent

   2. (of an expression) not having a reference of its own but requiring completion by another expression

Other Word Forms

• incompletely adverb
• incompleteness noun
• subincomplete adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of incomplete¹

First recorded in 1350–1400; Middle English word from Late Latin word incomplētus. See in- ³, complete

Example Sentences

The response, said Bader Al-Saif, a professor of history at Kuwait University, was “in the same style of the offer it received — vague and incomplete.”

Read more on Los Angeles Times

LAHSA’s online dashboard for occupancy includes a caveat that the inventory system is still new and “data may be missing or incomplete.”

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A spokesperson for Kenvue, the company that owns Tylenol, said the post was taken out of context and incomplete.

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Though some officials present in the decision-making process told investigators they had taken notes in the field about evacuation decisions, the notes “were either incomplete, not time-stamped, or not maintained.”

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Earlswood had the sixth worst cancellation rate of any train station in Britain in the past year, excluding a small number of stations with unreliable or incomplete data.

Read more on BBC

Related Words

• deficient 
• fragmentary 
• inadequate 
• insufficient 
• lacking 
• partial 
• sketchy