To complicate means to make something more difficult, confusing, or tangled than it needs to be. When you complicate a simple plan, you add extra steps, rules, or problems that make it harder to follow through.

Imagine your teacher asks you to write a paragraph about your favorite animal. That's straightforward: pick an animal, write five sentences, done. But if you start worrying about making it funny, including three facts, adding a drawing, and using words from your vocabulary list, you've complicated a simple assignment. Each new requirement makes the task harder to complete.

Sometimes complications happen on their own. A camping trip gets complicated when it starts raining, someone forgets the tent poles, and the nearest store is an hour away. Other times, people complicate things by overthinking. A student might complicate a math problem by trying fancy methods when simple addition would work.

The word complicated describes something that's already difficult or intricate, like a complicated recipe with twenty ingredients or a complicated board game with a rulebook full of exceptions. When something is unnecessarily complicated, it means someone made it harder than it needed to be.