The Wrong Word Entirely, # 46

This has been going the rounds on Facebook, and I haven’t been able to trace its source. Given the system of pairings in the list, it seems clear that the wrong word has been chosen in the first pair:

Original source unknown

Complement has been mistaken for compliment. These words, identical bar the one vowel, have very different meanings. To borrow the definitions from Oxford Dictionaries, complement as a verb means to ‘add to something in a way that enhances or improves’, while compliment means to ‘admire and praise someone for something’.

OED shows that both derive from the same Latin root (complēmentum, meaning ‘that which fills up or completes’, from the verb complēre, ‘to fill up’), and come into English via French. It notes too that complement was sometimes used for compliment in the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries.
complements for compliments