What is repetition?

Repetition is the act of performing an action (or actions) multiple times. For instance, people often do repeated exercises at the gym, known as reps.

Repetition in action

To illustrate this, if you were instructing someone to do ten press-ups, you could say:

“do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up
do a press-up”

But what if you wanted to instruct them to do 40 press-ups? Or 100? A better (more efficient) way would be to say:

“Do 40 press-ups”

In this case, you’re simply asking them to repeat the task of performing a press-up, 40 times.

Less immediate repetition

In another example of repetition, you might regularly attend a meeting, or sit down to watch your favourite TV programme. This event might be repeated each week, month or term. If you were to add this event to a calendar, you’d be given options for describing the repetition.

In the calendar above, you can to specify the frequency of the repetition (weekly, monthly, every four weeks, etc.) as well as how many times to repeat the event. You can repeat the event forever, a set number of times, or until a specified date in the future.

Meeting a condition

Repeating until a condition is met is seen in a game of football, which is played until the referee blows the final whistle.

Now you’ve seen some examples of repetition in everyday life, look our for some of your own.