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I can't recall term used for duplicating extraneous words e.g. VIP person (Very Important Person Person), first question what is this term?

Second question, is the same term used when the duplicated term is a synonym?

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  • this one should have a tag "ras" and/or "redundant-acronym-syndrome". i don't have enough rep to do that. – spinodal Feb 17 '11 at 15:47
  • @spinodal: or the tag ras-redundant-acronym-syndrome – Lie Ryan Feb 17 '11 at 16:03
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It's called RAS Syndrome (Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome).

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    Lol -- reminds me of TLA (Three Letter Acronym), ETLA (Extended Three Letter Acronym), and EETLA (Expanded Extended Three Letter Acronym) – Billy ONeal Dec 19 '10 at 10:19
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    And "The TTP Project" (where TTP stands for "The TTP Project") :) – Stein G. Strindhaug Dec 20 '10 at 12:27
  • @Stein G. Strindhaug: good one, I hadn't heard of that. Trying to expand the acronym is a nice exercise in endless-loop recursion. – Marthaª Dec 22 '10 at 0:08
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    @Stein Yeah, and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. These are called recursive acronyms. – nyuszika7h Feb 20 '11 at 15:52
  • @SteinG.Strindhaug I guess "TTP" can also be considered to be a recursive acronym. – HelloGoodbye Nov 30 '15 at 15:56
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I think the word you're looking for is redundant. In the phrase VIP person, "person" is redundant because it is already implied by VIP. It is not a synonym. A synonym for VIP might be dignitary.

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