Collier's New Encyclopedia

A complete general encyclopedia of 1921 — the world as it was understood just after the Great War, from Aachen to Zwingli, across twelve volumes and six thousand pages.

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Complement

of an angle, what it lacks to make up 90°; of an arc, to make up a quadrant; and hence, in astronomy, the complement of a star is its zenithdistance. In music, two intervals, which together make up an octave, are called complementary. In arithmetic, if any number is sub subtracted from the next higher power of 10, the result is its complement. Thus 7 and 3 are complementary; so are 63 and 37; 881 and 119; and 1.4384386 is the complement to 8.5615614. In chromatics, red is the complement of green, orange of blue, and yellow of violet.

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