Definitions for "Pleonasm" Add To Word List
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An army of words escorting a corporal of thought.
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Redundancy of language in speaking or writing; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea; as, I saw it with my own eyes.
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the use of more words than are needed to give the sense
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using more words than necessary; "a tiny little child"
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a figure of speech -- involving a redundancy of expression
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a repetition of words or the adding of similar words
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a word or phrase which can be removed from a sentence without changing its meaning
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(noun) The repetition of meaning within a word, e.g. causeway, where both cause and way mean 'road'. Portmanteau (noun and adj.) A word made up of the blended sounds of two distinct words and combining the meanings of both, such as brunch. The term was first applied by Lewis Carroll to this type of word genesis.
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The unnecessary repetition of words is pleonasm. Example:“free gift”“I ain’t in no slump; I just ain’t hitting.”“It’s déjà vu all over again” (Yogi Berra)
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The bringing together of two concepts or words that are redundant like frozen ice, sharp point, killed dead, sandy beach, young child, positive praise (in ways different than 'oxymoron')
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The use of unnecessary or superfluous words. Poets often fall into this trap when trying to pad out a metrical line e.g. the clown's song from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.
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8.253.17 up Superfluous words
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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.
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