What is it called when you use unnecessary words?

Pleonasm is using more words than you need to, either accidentally or deliberately. The Greek root word in pleonasm is pleonazein, which describes something as more than enough. Used accidentally, a pleonasm is just long-winded wordiness, like a sentence that includes far more words than is necessary.

What is an example of pleonasm?

For example, “I like a smuggler. He is the only honest thief.” However, pleonasm is a combination of two or more words which are more than those required for clear expression. For example, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

What is a synonym for pleonasm?

In this page you can discover 16 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic expressions, and related words for pleonasm, like: verbosity, windiness, wordage, wordiness, excess, style, words, redundancy, verbiage, circumlocution and repetition.

What is it called when a word is redundant?

Pleonasm (/ˈpliːənæzəm/; from Ancient Greek πλεονασμός, pleonasmós, from πλέον, pleon ‘to be in excess’) is redundancy in linguistic expression, such as “black darkness” or “burning fire”. It is a manifestation of tautology by traditional rhetorical criteria, and might be considered a fault of style.

What is an example of Paralipsis?

Paralipsis is when a writer or speaker emphasizes something, while claiming to not say anything (or to say very little). Examples of Paralipsis: 1. It looks like you spent a lot of money today, not to mention that you borrowed $40.00 from me yesterday.

What’s the difference between redundancy and tautology?

Redundancy is any kind of repetition: phrases, sentences, paragraphs, entire books, it’s all the same; the scale isn’t important. A tautology refers to phrasing that repeats a single meaning in identical words: They followed each other one after the other in succession.

What is an antonym of Pleonasm?

Antonyms: brevity, compactness, compression, conciseness, condensation, directness, plainness, shortness, succinctness, terseness. Synonyms: circumlocution, diffuseness, periphrasis, prolixity, redundance, redundancy, surplusage, tautology, tediousness, verbiage, verbosity, wordiness.

What does Xertz mean?

One to remember the next time you play Scrabble, the word ‘xertz’ is a verb with unknown origins, although it is likely derived from a similar slang term. Pronounced ‘zerts’, it means ‘to gulp something down quickly and/or in a greedy fashion’.