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About 12,600,000 results in Google for this exact phrasing: "Currently online now". Is it a kind of online jargon? It sounds redundant to me; shouldn't it be either "currently" or "now"?

Examples of usage:

many of your friends are currently online now!

I'm currently online now and will most likely be online for the rest of the day

There are almost 300 titles currently online now, and we have more that are being put up every week.

Is it grammatically acceptable to use "currently" and "now" in the same sentence?

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Trying to be slightly kind, the only thing I'd comment is that as a marketing device, it's common to end sentences with short words like "now!", "free!" to help call the audience to attention. So you could argue that "currently" is the content word and "now!" is the marketing device.

But it does seem a bit redundant as you say.

Either way the sentence is grammatical, as is the sentence "The ladder rebooted the window".

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  • Grammatically it's awful - you'd never get such blatant tautology past your English teacher, I think. But marketese is a language all of its own - with either its own special grammar, or no grammar at all. Depending on either the whim of the writer, or past sales data suggesting that more people buy more things when the "pitch" ends with a nice short buzzword.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 15:22
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It is quite redundant in almost every case. "Currently online" is typically preferred.

I do agree that it is generally accepted in a marketing context, though I'm personally less likely to click anything as ugly-sounding as that.

I think it may also be valid in your third example. "There are almost 300 titles currently online now, and we have more that are being put up every week." If "now" is being used not to express merely "at the current moment," but instead to express that titles have been added over time, it may be acceptable. A usage of this type seems to include a subtle differentiation of implied time passing and changes being made.

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Well, it does seem to be a bit redundant. I guess the phrase just emphasises the very current state of being online.

You get the same effect when you say, "it is very very interesting."

And it also sounds a bit better than online currently now / online now currently. Plus, a bit to do with marketing influence as Neil mentioned in his post.

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"many of your friends are currently online now" - You see, when you look at your friends' pictures, if they are online it will actually SAY next to their picture "currently online". Or have a dot that represents the same thing, whatever. The site is letting you know that many of your friends are "currently online" at this very moment. Still redundant, still incorrect, IMHO.

Your second example has no explanation for its redundancy. You would say "I am currently online" or "I am online now" unless what you are is referred to as "currently online" and not just simply described as such.

In the third example, I could see if an online service had a repository of many more books than they have room to keep "currently online" at any given moment. If you were allowed to choose which books you wanted to be available to you, after you chose they might tell you that "these 300 books are now currently online" and actually be (almost) grammatically correct. Sorry if this didn't make sense; I'm getting a bit sleepy while writing it. Hope it helps.

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