Pleonasm
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Pleonasm is the use of more words (or even word-parts) than necessary to express an idea clearly. The word comes originally from Greek ("excess"). A closely related, narrower concept (some would say a subset of pleonasm) is rhetorical tautology, in which essentially the same thing is said more than once in different words (e.g. "repeat again" in lieu of "say again"). Regardless, both are a form of redundancy. Pleonasm and tautology each refer to different forms of redundancy in speech and the written word.
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See also
- Double negative
- Rhetoric
- Dummy pronoun
- Redundancy (language)
- Tautology (rhetoric)
- Fowler's Modern English Usage
- Politics and the English Language (George Orwell)
- Elegant variation
- Prolixity
- Figure of speech
- Cognate object
- List of tautological place names
- Irish bull
- Verbosity
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