verbiage

verbiage, redundancy, tautology, pleonasm, circumlocution, periphrasis are comparable when they denote a fault of style or a form or mode of expression involving the use of too many words.

Verbiage may imply delight in words for their own sake (as for their sound, their color, or their suggestions) and overindulgence in their use for these reasons; the term, however, often suggests a pointless or habitual wordiness that tends to make what is written dull, meaningless, obscure, or unduly heavy reading

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his concise and well-informed speeches were welcomed amid the common verbiage of debate— Buchan

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the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phoebe's imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance— H. G. Wells

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Redundancy does not in general carry the implications of expansiveness, floridity, or heaviness so often apparent in verbiage; but the term sometimes implies the use of more words than are required by idiom or syntax and so suggests a fault of style

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redundancies result. . . when the writer fails to perceive the scope of a word— Westley

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the . . . florid redundancy of Italian prose— Ellis

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Tautology is needless or useless repetition of the same idea in different words

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he cautioned his students to beware of such tautologies as "visible to the eye" and "audible to the ear"

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Pleonasm implies the use of syntactically unnecessary words as in "the man he said." Sometimes pleonastic expressions are acceptable means of emphasis and are thought of as figures of speech

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it is a pleonasm, a figure usual in Scripture, by a multiplicity of expressions to signify one notable thing— South

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Circumlocution and periphrasis denote a roundabout or indirect way of saying a thing

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the gift of the pamphleteer, who cuts through academic circumlocution— Dean

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this was not however a question to be asked point-blank, and I could not think of any effective circumlocution— Conrad

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one of those anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the law who . . . deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too delicate a conscience (a periphrasis which might be abridged considerably)—De Quincey

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"The answer is in the negative" is a periphrasis for "no"— Time

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Analogous words: wordiness, verboseness, prolixity, diffuseness (see corresponding adjectives at WORDY)