Word.ws English Dictionary

two's complements

two's complements is the plural of two's complement.

Meaning of two's complement

Noun

two's complement (plural two's complements)

  1. The number obtained by complementing every bit of a given number and adding one. A number and its complement add to 2ⁿ, where n is the word size of the machine.
    • The two's complement of 0xAAAA is 0x5556 on a 16-bit machine, and 0xFFFF5556 on a 32-bit machine.
  2. The convention by which bit patterns with high bit 0 represent positive numbers from 0 to 2ⁿ⁻¹-1 directly, while bit patterns with high bit 1 represent negative numbers from −1 to -2ⁿ⁻¹, n being the word size of the machine, and the numeric complement of a number is its two's complement.
    • Nearly all modern computers use two's complement for integer arithmetic.

Questions about two's complements

What is two's complements the plural of?
Two's complements is the plural of two's complement.

Words near two's complements in the dictionary

  1. two wrongs make a right
  2. two's company and three is none
  3. two's company, three's a crowd
  4. two's company, three's trumpery
  5. two's complement
  6. two's complements
  7. two, six, heave
  8. two-a-day
  9. two-a-days
  10. two-and-twenty
  11. two-armed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: two's complements (page history and authors); two's complement (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “two's complements.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/two%27s_complements. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.