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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

> compleat

Sorry, i've seen this spelling enough to now ask if this is a word that I don't know about or if it's just a mis-spelling of complete. Not trying to pick on you. I've had errors before, especially in space stuff (altitude & attitude).

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There’s also usage of that spelling in Magic: The Gathering. One of the biggest villain factions in the Lore of the game, Phyrexians, assimilate beings against their will and brutally “perfect” them through magical and surgical means. The process is called “Compleation” - https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Compleation

The recent arc of expansions for the game have heavily features the Phyrexians, so the spelling might be more common this year. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

One of my favorite things about life is that there is an explanation for everything

Typo+iPhone+Dyslexia

I usually edit my posts after posting (sometimes multiple times), I find going back and rereading them I always find errors. Will leave that mistake for prosperity and context. Dyslexia is both a gift and a curse, but only if you let it.

As far as typos go, this one has been very informative :)

> prosperity

Just to help out: you probably mean "posterity" [0]

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/posterity

I give up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

An internet search can be illustrative: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/compleat

> (Late Modern) Archaic spelling of complete.

I love how this comes back around and we've actually bastardized the original spelling haha.

There’s a tabletop game store in Manhattan called https://www.thecompleatstrategist.com/.

Presumably named a la The Compleat Angler (a book on fishing from 1653).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compleat_Angler

He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.

I find this interesting because the word "English" literally means "fisherman". The "Eng" is an archaic short form for the word that today we call "angle" - referring to the hook that the fishermen used, with it's distinctive angle. At the time, the people to whom were referred to as such still lived on the northern European continent, they would migrate to the island some time later.

huh - TIL: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-com3.htm

TL;DR: Compleat and Complete were originally different spellings for the same word. In UK, compleat is still just an archaic spelling. In USA, compleat is used as an adjective to refer specifically to having all the necessary elements or skills.

I’ve never heard it in the USA outside of in old book titles. I’ll add The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague DeCamp as another prominent example. That’s from 1975 and probably a conscious reference to The Compleat Angler, along with a pun on a prior anthology called The Incomplete Enchanter.

Even the examples cited in the article seem like they’re out of older books deliberately invoking antiquity with the spelling. The only recent example (Bova, Mars, 1992) is from the SF/F genre where esoteric words like that get batted around more in general.

So I’m going to go with that being about as common in US English as UK—used for effect only.

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