tautological

[ tawt-l-oj-i-kuhl ]

adjective

(of a phrase) needlessly repetitive without adding information or clarity:Third-world communist regimes, with tautological insistence, call themselves "people's democracies."
(especially in logic) defined in terms of itself:Some would argue that the phrase ''survival of the fittest'' is tautological, in that the fittest are defined as those that survive to reproduce.

Origin of tautological

To say that, if it increases, his wages increase is to be simply tautologous.
The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) | Leslie Stephen
The phrase pre-established harmony is, strictly speaking, tautologous.
Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding | John Dewey
Or if the first expression be preferred, the second may be omitted, as perfectly tautologous.
Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson | Thomas Jefferson
I am (to adopt a phrase which is to me tautologous) an orthodox Jew.'
The Grandchildren of the Ghetto | Israel Zangwill
And the tautologous, useless nature of the hypothesis in the second forces the theory back to the first view.
Creative Intelligence | John Dewey, Addison W. Moore, Harold Chapman Brown, George H. Mead, Boyd H. Bode, Henry Waldgrave, Stuart James, Hayden Tufts, Horace M. Kallen

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