redundant
/rɪˈdʌnd(ə)nt
/adjective
1Not or no longer needed or useful; superfluous: an appropriate use for a redundant church many of the old skills had become redundant...
- Now, the Parochial Church Council has decided it can no longer delay the inevitable and will apply for the church to be made redundant.
- Despite St Martin's officially being a redundant church, which cannot stage weddings, Jenny was determined that she should tie the knot in her home village.
- The original St John's Church became redundant in 1938 and was once threatened with demolition through road-widening.
Synonyms
unnecessary, not required, inessential, unessential, needless, unneeded, uncalled for, dispensable, disposable, expendable, unwanted, useless;
surplus, surplus to requirements, superfluous, too much/many, supernumerary, excessive, in excess, extra, additional, spare;
French de trop
informal needed like a hole in the head
1.1British No longer in employment because there is no more work available: eight permanent staff were made redundant...
- The council claimed its ambition to support the results of the scheme financially could not be achieved unless more than 120 employees were made redundant.
- This initially took the form of the Redundancy Payments Act of 1965, which obliged employers to pay compensation to employees who were made redundant.
- The employer sold the business some years after the employee commenced work and the employee was made redundant.
Synonyms
sacked, dismissed, laid off, discharged;
unemployed, idle, jobless, out of work, out of a job
rare disemployed
1.2 Engineering (Of a component) not strictly necessary to functioning but included in case of failure in another component: the modules are linked using a redundant fibre-optic cable...
- There is a single path for power and cooling distribution, with no redundant components; all systems are N.
- Because these systems include redundant components, even strong perturbations may lead to only a subtle phenotype.
- Some of these components are redundant while others are critical paths so that any failure will bring the whole system down.
Derivatives
redundantly
- ‘I played really well,’ he said, rather redundantly.
- ‘I'm Brittany,’ she added, somewhat redundantly.
- Being precise was more important than being succinct, and often points were given for redundantly making redundant statements of redundancy.
Origin
Late 16th century (in the sense 'abundant'): from Latin redundant- 'surging up', from the verb redundare (see redound).