Wiederholungsmanagement

Wiederholung is a German noun meaning the act of repeating something. It covers the repetition of actions, statements, events, or experiences. In everyday usage, it can also denote a re-run of media content, such as a television program shown again.

The term derives from the German verb wiederholen (“to repeat”), formed from wieder (“again”) and holen (“to fetch”), conveying the sense of bringing something back again.

In education and cognitive psychology, repetition is a fundamental technique for learning. Repetition strengthens memory traces and supports encoding into long-term memory. Spaced repetition—reviewing material at expanding intervals—has strong empirical support for vocabulary and factual knowledge retention. Excessive rote repetition without meaning can hinder understanding or motivation.

In music and literature, repetition appears as motifs, refrains, and recurring lines, contributing to structure and recognizability. In linguistics, reduplication and parallel phrasing use repetition to convey grammatical or semantic meaning. Repetition thus serves both practical and artistic functions.

In media, Wiederholung often refers to the broadcasting of programs at a later time or the recurrence of events in a schedule.

See also: memory, spaced repetition, repetition in music, reduplication, redundancy.