Other forms: complimented, compliments, complimenting
A compliment is something good said out loud about you — your cooking, your haircut, the way you dealt with a difficult phone call. That colour really suits you. Your dog is beautiful. Small, free, and remembered for weeks.
As a verb you compliment someone on something — on their garden, on their patience — and the preposition is on, never for. You pay a compliment, you take a remark as a compliment, and if you keep running your own photographs down until somebody disagrees, you are fishing for compliments. A backhanded compliment is praise with a sting inside it: you look so much better than last year. Then the spelling trap that catches everybody. Complement with an e is a different word: it means the thing that completes something, so the wine complements the fish and a ship sails with a full complement of crew. The kind words are the ones with an i.
1nouncomplimentA remark that says something good about someone or their work.~69%
“She took the compliment and went pink.”
synonyms: kind word, tribute
2verbdoneTo say something good to someone about what they have done.~29%
“He complimented the chef on the sauce.”
3nounpolitePolite good wishes, or something given free by the house.~2%
“The first drink arrives with the manager's compliments.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 53 sentences found in the wild and placed 41 of them on a sense (12 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
compliment is a remark.
Also accepted in games: praise
Spanish cumplir meant to do what is proper, and cumplimiento was the doing of it — the bow, the polite words you owed a guest at the door. That travelled through Italian complimento and French compliment into English. It is the same word as complement, which is exactly why the two are so easy to muddle: both go back to the idea of completing what courtesy asked of you.
Latin
complēmentum
Spanish
cumplimiento
Italian
complimento
French
compliment
English, today
compliment
Built from
Borrowed from French compliment, itself a borrowing of Italian complimento, which in turn is a borrowing from Spanish cumplimiento, from cumplir (“to comply, complete, do what is proper”) + -miento or Latin complēmentum. a doublet of complement. ġeswǣsnes.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA