Repeated

Repeated is the past participle of the verb repeat and is used as an adjective or modifier to indicate that something occurs again or is done again, often multiple times. Phrases such as “repeated attempts,” “repeated measures,” or “repeated exposure” illustrate its general usage.

Etymology: The word originates from the verb repeat, which derives from Latin repetere (“to seek again; to return”) via Old French repeter and Middle English; the past participle is formed with the suffix -ed in modern English.

Usage and examples: In language and literature, repeated describes words, sounds, or motifs that recur. Reduplication is a morphological process in which a part of a word or the whole word is repeated for emphasis or grammatical effect. In science and statistics, repeated refers to events or trials that occur multiple times, as in repeated measures experiments, where the same subjects are tested under different conditions. In biology, repeated sequences such as tandem repeats appear in genomes and can be used in linkage analysis and forensic genetics. In computing and data processing, repeated patterns or substrings are common in strings and can be exploited in compression and pattern-matching algorithms. In music, repetition is a structural device in which a motif, phrase, or section is performed again, often indicated by repeat signs in the score.

See also: repetition, reiteration, redundancy.