Meaning & use

duplicative

adjective·Academic

Repeating or copying something that already exists, often in a way that is unnecessary or wasteful.

See it in a sentence

The audit found several duplicative programs that served the exact same families.

Merging the two databases finally removed all of the duplicative customer records.

A note on using this word

Duplicative is common in business and legal writing to describe wasteful overlap, rather than simple repetition in everyday speech.

Words with a similar meaning

redundantrepetitive

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

Words with an opposite meaning

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