Other forms: redundancies
In British employment, redundancy is losing your job because the role itself is no longer needed. Made redundant, redundancy pay, a round of redundancies.
That is a specific legal status and not the same as being dismissed: the job goes, not the person, and statutory redundancy pay follows. American English says layoff. The engineering sense is quite different and positive: redundancy means having a spare system in case one fails — redundant power supplies are a good thing. And in writing, redundancy means unnecessary repetition. Note that redundant on its own in Britain almost always means unemployed.
1nounredundancyThe ending of a job because the role is no longer needed.
“Forty redundancies were announced in one morning.”
synonyms: layoff
2nounspareA spare system kept in case another fails.
“There is redundancy built into every part of the network.”
3noununnecessaryUnnecessary repetition in writing.
“The paragraph is all redundancy and no argument.”
redundancy is a losing of a role, or a spare capacity.
Also accepted in games: layoff
re-DUND-ancy → the job they got RID of
The company got rid of the job, and the person went with it.
hooks ontorid
Proto-Indo-European
*wed-
Latin
redundāns
English
redundant
English, today
redundancy
Built from
From redundant + -cy. redundant comes from Latin redundāns, present participle of redundō (“to overflow, redound”), from red- (“again, back”) + undō (“to surge, flood”), from unda (“a wave”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA