The complete works of an artist, writer, musician, group, etc., is a collection of all of their cultural works. For example, Complete Works of Shakespeare is an edition containing all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. A Complete Works published edition of a text corpus is normally accompanied with additional information and critical apparatus. It may include notes, introduction, a biographical sketch, and may pay attention to textual variants.
Similarly, the term body of work may be used to describe the entirety of the creative or academic output produced by a particular individual or unit.
Complete works may be titled by a single word, "Works".[1] "Collected works" is often treated as a synonym. A distinction began to be seen clearly in the second half of the 18th century.[2]
The Latin language equivalent Opera Omnia is still used in English, for example, to refer to the works of Galen or Leonhard Euler.[3] German usage distinguishes as a complete corpus, for a published edition of the works, and Gesammelte Werke or collected works that may be selective in some way. A contrasting term is "selected works", which is a collection of works chosen according to some criterion, e.g., by prominence, or as a representative selection.