Tautology

//tɔˈtɑl.ə.d͡ʒi// noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Redundant use of words, a pleonasm, an unnecessary and tedious repetition. uncountable

    "It is tautology to say, "Forward Planning"."

  2. 2
    useless and pointless repetition wordnet
  3. 3
    An expression that features tautology. countable

    "The expression "raze to the ground" is a tautology, since the word "raze" includes the notion "to the ground"."

  4. 4
    (logic) a statement that is necessarily true wordnet
  5. 5
    A statement that is true for all truth values of its propositional variables. countable
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  1. 6
    A statement that is true for all truth values of its Boolean atoms. countable

Synonyms

All synonyms
abundanceamplitudebattologybedizenmentcircumambagescircumbendibus

Example

More examples

"She caught sight of the tautology that she was looking for in a crowd of other, equally useless and potentially dangerous, tautologies."

Etymology

From Late Latin tautologia, from Ancient Greek ταὐτολογία (tautología) from ταὐτός (tautós, “the same”) + λόγος (lógos, “explanation”). By surface analysis, tauto- + -logy.

Related phrases

boolean atomfirst order logicpropositional logicpropositional variabletruth value

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.