Incomplete: adjective - not complete; not fully formed; unfinished; not whole or thorough; lacking something, imperfect.
Uncompleted: adjective - not completed.
I display these alternatives here, as they came up in a discussion at my writers’ group a short while ago. We spent a little while discussing the meanings of the two words and came away without any conclusion, so I looked them up in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (my standard reference dictionary, and the one from which the definitions were taken: thank you to the Oxford Press). Apart from the fact that ‘uncompleted’ has only one, very specific, meaning, I can discern no essential difference between the two terms used in the context of the sentence we were discussing at the time. I’d still go for ‘incomplete’, simply because I find ‘uncompleted’ has an ugly sound to it. It goes to show that, in English, the chosen word can often be a matter of taste and preference without actually altering meaning in a significant way. Agreed?
The picture is just a shot I took a while ago. Zemanta, the widget I use for illustrations, came up with nothing suitable this time.
1 comment:
Incomplete or Uncomplete is the standard and natural word in modern English when something is not finished, not whole, or has missing parts. Uncomplete has existed in English and can be found in older or very rare usage, but it is not the normal choice in contemporary English. If you mean “not complete,” use incomplete. If you specifically mean that something has not yet been completed, uncompleted can also be grammatically valid, although incomplete or unfinished is often more natural.
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