Complete Specification
This is a matter of British usage. It simply represents the final form of a patent's documentation. A patent and its number may stand simply and alone, with no Provisional Specifications or complication of numbers being associated with it. Therefore, a great fraction of the British patent documents we study simply feature the phrase Complete Specification, along with the patent's dates filed and accepted(or granted). Others do involve Provisional Specifications, and may or may not feature that phrase on page one of the document, though, when applicable, the filing date(s) of any Provisional Specification(s) usually will be displayed clearly, and the beginning of the document. Again, not all British patents involve Complete Specifications. For those that do, distinct or different numeric designations may or may not be involved. For patterned variations on this, see Provisional Specification.
Antique publications, particularly patents, British or otherwise, have on occasion given us British patent numbers or filing dates which do in fact turn up within original patent documents, but only upon close reading, not being the means through which the patent material is organized within Espacenet or other modern databases. Aside from per se digital issues, this has to do with patent documents being printed in a retrospective manner. That is, the inventor or whomever else may refer from one patent to another may not know the later-determined form the documentation will take. What becomes retrospectively a "Provisional Specification" had likely been initiated as a "Complete Specification", or simply, as a patent.
It is by way of these British usages that the word "specification" has entered our lexicon and has influenced phraseology on our patent pages. Again, the status difference between the "provisional" and the "complete" may be entirely retrospective. This likely evolved as the British officials experienced one patent's being superseded by another. The relation between the Complete Specification and the Provisional Specification, if and when numerical variation is involved, has no precise analog within any other national system. When an American patent, for instance, is a renewal, the serial number is changes, but the overall "patent number" is not. Naturally, when an American patent is not superseded by a renewal it keeps its initial serial number, along with its overall "patent number", of course.
This all represents document publication or printing fairly well along in the process of an invention's being formally registered. It may represent a different emphasis or outlook relative to that of the French, in particular, in which the certificat d'addition is at least semantically and administratively handled as an add-on, relative to an initial or fundamental innovation, at least nominally and administratively distinct, as a document type, from the brevet. Within the British phraseology, "Provisional" status relative to "Complete" clearly treats the latter as having more true substance.
These are all matters of administrative culture, the international variability therein. These are matters of national temperament and national image.
