All you need to know about redundancy ( redundant phrases — pleonasms )

2 min readJun 9, 2020

Pleonasms are the opposites of oxymora . A pleonasms consists of two concepts that are redundant.

Some pleonastic expressions are also known as tautologies . Tautology means , “ needless repetition of an idea in a different word , phrase or in a sentence ”

Examples:

Actual experience
Advanced planning
Advance reservation
Armed gunman
Cheap price
Cold temperature
Commute back and forth
Difficult dilemma
General public
Green colour
Natural instinct
Reason is because
Suddenly exploded
Regular routine
Pre-recorded

Redundant Acronyms and initialisms:

Example — PIN Number = personal identification number number

The problem is that PIN means Personal Identification Number .

Do you need to say “Number” afterwards ? In fact , it is quite wrong to do so, far what is a Personal Identification Number Number ?

Pleonastic Mistakes

AC Current
ATM machine
DC current
GMT time
HIV virus
LCD display
RAM memory
SAT test

Pleonastic — tautological- redundant list :

12 o’clock midnight

12 o’clock noon

A. M in the morning

Added bonus

Advance forward

Advance warning

Awful bad

Classic tradition

Combined together

Dead corpse

Duplicate copy

Honest truth

Etymologically redundant expression:

There are many words and phrases which contain redundancy in their etymology. However, this doesn’t really qualify them as pleonasms in most cases.

Head Chef — The word chef comes from French which means head.
Cash box — The word cash comes from Italian word cassa or French word casse which means box.
Hailstone — Hail derives from the Greek for stone. It is somewhat redundant. Then to speak of a hailstone or stone stone .

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