Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use complicate in a sentence

31 example sentences · verb, adjective

Complicate means to make complex; to modify so as to make something intricate or difficult. Example: “Don't complicate yourself in issues that are beyond the scope of your understanding.”

Examples of complicate by meaning

verbTo involve in a convoluted matter.

  • Don't complicate yourself in issues that are beyond the scope of your understanding.
  • John has been complicated in the affair by new tapes that surfaced.
  • The DA has made every effort to complicate me in the scandal.

verbTo coexist with (another disease) creating a complication.

  • This heterogeneous group has been expanded to embrace diseases unrelated to malaria, diseases complicating malaria, and symptoms and sequelæ of malaria.1909, William Heiskell Deaderick, A Practical Study of Malaria, page 232

More sentences with complicate

  • Over years, that difference would grow, complicating calculations between spacecraft and a lunar base.2024 April 4, “Coordinated Lunar Time: The U.S. wants the moon to have its own time zone”, in Morning Edition, spoken by Steve Inskeep…. From the entry Coordinated Lunar Time
  • If the voice coming out of my body is legibly male, it complicates my presence.2022 January 25, Monique Jenkinson, Faux Queen: A Life in Drag, Bywater Books, →ISBN. From the entry work
  • Unfortunately, the inherent unobservability of these variables complicates their use in practice.2010, Jordi Galí, “The New-Keynesian Approach to Monetary Policy Analysis: Lessons and New Directions”, in Volker Wieland, editor, The…. From the entry unobservability
  • Different physical supports (canvas, fiberboard, heavily gessoed wood) further complicate Mr.2008 April 19, Roberta Smith, “Is Painting Small the Next Big Thing?”, in New York Times. From the entry gessoed
  • Complicating matters, some people suffer from Mnemophobia, the fear of memories.1985, John Ficarra, The Mad Book of Fears and Phobias, New York, NY: Warner Books, →ISBN, unnumbered page. From the entry mnemophobia
  • This fact complicates the problem of estimating future oil supplies, especially at prices substantially above preembargo levels.1977, Crude Oil Transportation System, Valdez AK to Midland TX, Proposed by SOHIO: Environmental Impact Statement. From the entry preembargo
  • At present, passenger and goods traffic intermingle, a factor which complicates operation.1959 October, “Station Reconstruction at Leeds”, in Railway Magazine, page 686. From the entry intermingle
  • Factor in Grammer’s outspoken Trumpism, which complicates the legacy of his defining role, and fans may be forgiven for feeling trepidatious.2023 February 27, Elle Hunt, “‘Don’t make Frasier best friends with Elon Musk!’ Writers and comics offer their reboot tips”, in The…. From the entry trepidatious
  • (Admittedly, the fact that Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s vampiric treasury secretary, was a Fury Road executive producer complicates this whole parallel.2017 December 1, Tom Breihan, “Mad Max: Fury Road might already be the best action movie ever made”, in The Onion AV Club, archived from…. From the entry vampiric
  • The gastrosexual persona represents a masculinity that complicates gender role boundaries in terms of both actions and affect.2017, Michelle Szabo, Shelley Koch, Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Bloomsbury Publishing, page 224. From the entry gastrosexual
  • Three factors complicate this push by local governments to 'metropolise'.2016, Lochner Marais, Etienne Nel, Ronnie Donaldson, Secondary Cities and Development. From the entry metropolise
  • To complicate matters, father and sons changed their names to 'Bigg-Wither', while the girls strong-mindedly kept to their simple original 'Bigg'.2012, Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, →ISBN. From the entry strong-mindedly
  • Variation and changes in the trans fatty acid content of different foods, especially in processed foods, further complicate such estimates.2006, C Williams, J Buttriss, Improving the Fat Content of Foods, →ISBN, page 492. From the entry food
  • Two consequences of parentless elements complicate the rules.2004, Michael Kay, XSLT 2.0 Programmer's Reference. From the entry parentless
  • It could complicate things for our little household.1989, Paul Chadwick, Concrete: Visible Breath, Dark Horse Books. From the entry roving
  • Further complicating matters is an attractive, semieducated globetrotter from Westchester named Peggy Whitton, who has an affair with Mehta.1988 November 18, Tom Boeker, “A Map of the World; Scapin”, in Chicago Reader, archived from the original on 06 Mar 2016. From the entry semieducated
  • However, the movement of so many unnecessary characters complicates the use of these computers in an internetted multisite environment.1979 December 14, “How Responsive, Reliable, and Survivable are the WWMCCS Standard Computer Systems?”, in The World Wide Military Command…. From the entry internetted
  • A complicating feature of conifers, when estimating the number of lethals, is that polyembryos are common during seed development.1977, M. Thompson Conkle, Knobcone Pine Self Compatibility and Isozyme Inheritance, page 61. From the entry polyembryo
  • On Bumble, virtual location hopping is common, and hoodfishing—when users seem local but are actually far away—can complicate your search for nearby matches.2025 November, Chris Pleines, “Bumble Review November 2025”, in Dating Scout, archived from the original on 29 Nov 2025. From the entry hoodfishing
  • The absence of classical input options certainly complicates the playing of typical genre games as represented by, for example, Jump'n'Runs or Shoot'em Ups.2016, Thomas Lucka, iOS Game Development: Developing Games for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. From the entry jump'n'run
  • The indictment of officer Michael Roberts also highlights another color barrier that can complicate matters of police discipline—that's the so-called blue wall of silence.2008 July 15, Brandt Williams, Elizabeth Stawicki, “Minneapolis cop indicted on corruption charges”, in Minnesota Public Radio, retrieved…. From the entry blue wall of silence
  • It was slowing her down in adventure races, and it was complicating her plans to fastpack a bunch of trails in New Zealand.2004 May, Katy Schafer, “The Challenge”, in Backpacker, volume 32, number 156, page 87. From the entry fastpack
  • To further complicate matters, the reactions of family members to the multi-addiction patterns were as unhealthy as the coping of the addicts themselves.1983, Patrick Carnes, The sexual addiction. From the entry multi-addiction
  • Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are complicating publishers’ efforts to tackle the growing problem of paper mills — companies that produce fake scientific papers to order.2023 May 31, Layal Liverpool, “AI intensifies fight against ‘paper mills’ that churn out fake research”, in Nature, →DOI. From the entry paper mill
  • However, as was often the case in games between these players, Richter looks for ways to complicate things for Sämisch by adding to his clock problems.2018 October 5, Alan McGowan, Kurt Richter: A Chess Biography with 499 Games, McFarland, →ISBN, page 88. From the entry va banque
  • Not only is that global environment changing with respect to climate, but the accelerating pressures on the environment from anthropogenic activity are complicating our understanding of cryospheric change.2009, Olav Slaymaker, Richard Kelly, The Cryosphere and Global Environmental Change, John Wiley & Sons, preface. From the entry cryosphere
  • The consequence for that approach has been to complicate the syntax of verbs which cannot passivize: It is proposed that they have a more complex syntax that doesn’t allow passivization.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 84. From the entry passivization

Meaning of complicate

  1. verb To make complex; to modify so as to make something intricate or difficult.
  2. verb To involve in a convoluted matter.
  3. verb To coexist with (another disease) creating a complication.

Full definition of complicate

Questions about complicate in a sentence

How do you use complicate in a sentence?
Complicate is used as a verb and adjective. For example: “Don't complicate yourself in issues that are beyond the scope of your understanding.”
What is a short sentence with complicate?
“It could complicate things for our little household.”
What does complicate mean?
Complicate means to make complex; to modify so as to make something intricate or difficult.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: complicate (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use complicate in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/complicate. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.