0 the use of more words than are needed to express a meaning, done either unintentionally or for emphasis; an example of this: --
The members of a student fraternity can be called frat(ernity) boys, technically preferable to the pleonasm frat-bro(ther), and remain so for life as adults, after graduation.
See also tautology (rhetoric) and pleonasm.
In particular, pleonasm sometimes serves the same function as rhetorical repetitionit can be used to reinforce an idea, contention or question, rendering writing clearer and easier to understand.
On the other hand, as is the case with any literary or rhetorical effect, excessive use of pleonasm weakens writing and speech; superfluous words distract from the content.
The term pleonasm is most often, however, employed as synonymous with tautology.
Sometimes editors and grammatical stylists will use pleonasm to describe simple wordiness.
A more general classification of redundancy is pleonasm, which can be any unnecessary words (or even word parts).
Linguists usually call this redundancy to avoid confusion with syntactic pleonasm, a more important phenomenon for theoretical linguistics.
