repetition

American  

[rep-i-tish-uhn] / ˌrɛp ɪˈtɪʃ ən /

noun

• repetitions
  plural

1. the act of repeating, or doing, saying, or writing something again; repeated action, performance, production, or presentation.

2. repeated utterance; reiteration.

3. something made by or resulting from repeating.

4. a reproduction, copy, or replica.

5. Civil Law. an action or demand for the recovery of a payment or delivery made by error or upon failure to fulfill a condition.

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repetition British  

/ ˌrɛpɪˈtɪʃən /

noun

1. the act or an instance of repeating; reiteration

2. a thing, word, action, etc, that is repeated

3. a replica or copy

4. civil law Scots law the recovery or repayment of money paid or received by mistake, as when the same bill has been paid twice

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Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• nonrepetition
  noun

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• repetitions
  plural

Etymology

Origin of repetition

1375–1425; late Middle English (< Old French repeticion ) < Latin repetītiōn- (stem of repetītiō ), equivalent to repetīt ( us ) (past participle of repetere to repeat ) + -iōn- -ion

Explanation

Use the noun repetition to describe something that is repeated over and over, like the repetition of singing the alphabet song several times a day to help young children learn the letters. To correctly pronounce repetition, accent the third syllable: "re-peh-TIH-shun." Repetition and the closely related repeat come from the Latin word repetere, meaning "do or say again." It can be a very effective tool in public speaking, such as the repetition of "I have a dream that one day . . ." in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speech.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

repetition repetitions

More elaborate designs, including hatched bands, grids, and diamond-shaped motifs, also showed evidence of rotation, translation, repetition, and "embedding," i.e., the ability to build hierarchical levels of signs within the same surface.

From Science Daily ● Aug. 9, 2026

My mother, an excellent cook, understood repetition better.

From Salon ● Jul. 28, 2026

It isn’t some priceless antiquity that needs to be preserved only by faithful repetition and emulation.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026

Settings like this are a good place to start, since they’re controlled environments that involve plenty of repetition, rather than unpredictable elements.

From Barron's ● Jun. 30, 2026

You are given a hierarchy, recurring characters, the help of repetition, of anticipation, the firm hold of a long history.

From "Every Day" by David Levithan

Mr. and Mrs. Chandler have done their own silent scrubbing of the texts and acknowledge “omitting unneeded repetitions and Soviet clichés.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 10, 2026

"We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines, but organized them according to recurring principles -- parallelisms, grids, rotations and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo."

From Science Daily ● Aug. 9, 2026

As it’s around 300 pages long, including innumerable repetitions, you may ask if the length and density is a bug or a feature.

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 10, 2026

"Keely can be doing certain repetitions, and she's being physically sick from the lactic acid. It's a little bit inhumane at times."

From BBC ● Feb. 20, 2026

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

From "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

Related Words

• litany
• recurrence
• reiteration
• repeat
• rhythm