Other forms: complicated, complicating, complicates
To complicate something is to make it harder to understand or deal with. More parts, more conditions, more that can go wrong.
It very often appears with matters or things, and to complicate matters is a standard way of introducing a further problem into a story. Medicine has a precise noun, since a complication is a second problem arising from the first, and complications after surgery is a formal category. The adjective complicated is one of the most useful words in English for declining to explain something.
1verbcomplicateTo make something more difficult or involved.
“The weather complicated an already difficult journey.”
To complicate is to fold together. Latin complicō joins con, together, to plicō, to fold, so a complication is quite literally a fold in the thing.
Proto-Indo-European
*pleḱ-
Latin
complicātus
English, today
complicate
Built from
Learned borrowing from Latin complicātus, from complicō. early 17th century; Latin complicātus, of complicō (“to fold together, fold up”) (see -ate and -ate), from con- + plicō; see plaid, and compare complex. See also Middle English complicate (“involved”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA