The AI-powered English dictionary
countable and uncountable, plural complementarities
The state or characteristic of being complementary. quotations examples
"Synergy is one of the most overused words in the English language, but there is a tremendous complementarity to these organizations."
1987 April 2, Kenneth N. Gilpin, “2 Forecasting Firms to Merge”, in New York Times, retrieved 1 April 2014
(linguistics, philosophy, semantics) A semantic relationship between two words wherein negative use of one entails the affirmative of the other with no gradability; the relation of binary antonyms. quotations examples
For complementarity, there are entailments both from affirmative sentences to the corresponding negative sentences (which is what ordinary antonymy allows) and from negative sentences to the corresponding affirmative sentences. [...] That light is on entails That light is not off. That light is not on entails That light is off.
2005, Andrew John Merrison, Aileen Bloomer, Patrick Griffiths, Christopher J. Hall, Introducing Language in Use, London: Routledge, page 112