A phonetic complement is a phonetic symbol used to disambiguate word characters (logograms) that have multiple readings, in mixed logographic-phonetic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Akkadian cuneiform, Japanese, and Mayan. Often they reenforce the communication of the ideogram by repeating the first or last syllable in the term. Written English has few logograms, primarily numerals, and therefore few phonetic complements.

An example is the nd of 2nd 'second', which avoids ambiguity with 2 standing for the word 'two'. Hypothetically, if English had a more developed system of phonetic complements parallel with the scripts mentioned above, there might be a convention of writing 2ble for 'double', 2ple for 'couple', 2ary for 'February' (the second month), b2y for 'binary', 2r for 'pair', o2r for 'other' (which historically meant 'second'), 2in for 'twin', 2ni 'Gemini' ("the Twins"), etc. In Sumerian, the single word kur had two meanings: 'hill' and 'country'.

Akkadian, however, had separate words for these two meanings: šadú 'hill' and mātu 'country'. When Sumerian cuneiform was adapted for writing Akkadian, this was ambiguous because both words were written with the same character (conventionally transcribed KUR, after its Sumerian pronunciation). To alert the reader as to which Akkadian word was intended, the phonetic complement -ú was written after KUR if hill was intended, so that the characters KUR-ú were pronounced šadú, whereas KUR without a phonetic complement was understood to mean mātu 'country'.

Phonetic complements also indicated the Akkadian nominative and genitive cases.

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