Duplicades

Duplicades is a term used in several disciplines to denote items, records, or features that occur in two or more identical copies. The word appears in Romance languages, notably Catalan and Portuguese, as duplicades meaning duplicates. In English, the related concept is duplication or duplicates, and duplications are discussed under data integrity, redundancy, or evolutionary genetics.

In linguistics, duplication commonly refers to reduplication, a process where a word or part of it is repeated to convey grammatical or semantic emphasis, plurality, or aspect. While reduplication is not identical to a generic duplicate, the term can appear in discussions of duplicative morphologies in some languages.

In information technology and data management, duplicates are identical records or files. Data deduplication is a technique to identify and remove or consolidate duplicates to save storage space and improve data integrity. Duplicate detection often relies on hashing, checksums, or record linkage algorithms.

In biology and genetics, gene or segmental duplications create copies of genetic material. Duplications can arise by errors during replication or recombination and contribute to genetic novelty and evolution. Duplicated genes may diverge in function over time.

In archiving, libraries, and publishing, duplicates can arise when items are cataloged or published more than once. Proper deduplication helps maintain accuracy in catalogs and search systems, reducing confusion for users.

See also duplication, deduplication, reduplication, gene duplication, redundancy.