Redundancy

How to spell redundancy

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce redundancy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does redundancy mean?

1. nounThe state of being unnecessary because something is excessive or duplicates what already exists.
2. nounThe dismissal of an employee because the role itself is no longer needed by the organisation.
3. nounThe deliberate duplication of components or systems so that a backup takes over if one part fails.

Redundancy in a sentence

• The editor cut the report for redundancy, since several paragraphs repeated the same point.

• After the factory closed, she received a generous redundancy payment from her former employer.

• The aircraft has built-in redundancy, with three independent hydraulic systems.

• There is too much redundancy in the manual, with the same warning printed on every page.

• The company announced a wave of redundancy across its regional offices.

• The data centre relies on redundancy so that a single power failure cannot bring it down.

Where does redundancy come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin redundantia, meaning an overflowing or excess, which was built on the verb redundare, literally 'to surge back' or 'to overflow'. That verb combined re- (back, again) with undare (to rise in waves or flood), and undare itself came from unda, the ordinary Latin word for 'a wave'. So the buried image is of water washing back and spilling over its proper limits, which is precisely how the idea of having more than is needed developed. English took the word in during the early 1600s, first in the sense of superfluous quantity or needless repetition of words. The modern British use for the loss of a job that is no longer required is a much later, twentieth-century extension of that same core idea of being surplus to requirement, and the spelling trap lies in the unstressed middle vowels and the -ancy ending rather than -ency.

How the word is built

• re- (again, back)
• und (from Latin undare, to surge or overflow)
• -ancy (noun suffix denoting a state or quality)