Pleonasm
Quick answer: Pleonasm is the use of more words than meaning requires, as in 'burning fire'. Learn when surplus words weaken poems and when they add deliberate weight.
Pleonasm is the use of more words than are strictly necessary to express a meaning, as in 'I saw it with my own eyes', 'a burning fire' or 'they descended down'. The Greek root means 'excess', and the figure names verbal surplus: words whose information is already supplied by their neighbours. Grammarians treat it mostly as a fault, but rhetoric has always kept a second file for pleonasm used on purpose.
Poets should know the term for both reasons. Unintended pleonasm is the flab that revision exists to remove, but deliberate pleonasm is an old, respectable tool of emphasis. 'With my own eyes' adds nothing logically and everything rhetorically, since the surplus enacts the speaker's insistence. The craft lies in knowing which kind you have written.
How It Works
Pleonasm lives inside phrases. A verb already contains a direction and the writer adds it anyway ('rise up', 'return back'); a noun contains a quality and the adjective restates it ('frozen ice'); an idiom carries built-in redundancy sanctified by use ('safe haven'). The surplus word is grammatical, comprehensible, and, strictly, useless.
Yet uselessness can be expressive. Compare two invented lines: 'I heard the news' and 'I heard the news with my own ears, in my own kitchen, in daylight.' The second is triple pleonasm, and it dramatises disbelief, a speaker piling up witnesses because the fact will not sink in.
Where You Will See It
Deliberate pleonasm is ancient. Biblical narrative repeats built-in details, answering and saying, seeing with eyes, as part of its formulaic music. Homeric epithets carry a similar surplus, since the wine-dark sea did not need re-darkening every time. Chaucer and the ballad tradition use emphatic doubling freely, and everyday speech keeps expressive pleonasms alive: people still say 'I made it myself, personally, with these hands' when pride, not information, is the message.
How to Handle It in Your Own Poems
In revision, treat every surplus word as guilty until it proves expressive. Directional verbs ('kneel down', 'lift up') deserve special suspicion, since metre often smuggles them in as syllable-fillers. But when a poem needs insistence, testimony or the sound of a voice talking itself into belief, controlled pleonasm supplies exactly that human excess. Make the surplus obviously deliberate, ideally patterned, so the reader hears emphasis rather than carelessness. A tight poem with one loud pleonasm reads as voice; a loose poem full of them reads as padding, and padding costs marks wherever language is being scored.
What poets can take from this
- Audit directional verbs first: 'down' after 'kneel' and 'up' after 'rise' rarely earn their syllable.
- Keep a surplus word only if deleting it changes the voice, not just the length.
- Pattern deliberate pleonasm, repeating the shape so it reads as design.
- Use pleonastic witness phrases ('with my own eyes') for testimony and disbelief.
- Beware metrical padding: if a word exists only to fill the beat, recast the line.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of someone insisting on something nobody believes, a sighting, a memory, an innocence, and use deliberate pleonasm as the engine of the voice: own eyes, own ears, own two hands. Then write the final couplet with no surplus at all, and let the sudden economy land the truth.
Questions
What is the difference between pleonasm and tautology?
Usage varies, but a common distinction: pleonasm is surplus wording inside a phrase, where a word restates what a neighbour already implies ('burning fire'), while tautology repeats an entire idea in different words ('a fatal wound that killed him'). Pleonasm is padding; tautology is duplication.
Is pleonasm ever correct?
Yes. Many idioms are pleonastic and fully standard, like 'safe haven', and deliberate pleonasm is a recognised device of emphasis, as in 'I saw it with my own eyes'. It is a fault only when the surplus is accidental and expressive of nothing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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