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Word of the Day — Anadiplosis

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Edited by Richard Walker, Saturday 24 January 2026 at 22:57

I just stumbled on this word while looking up something else.

It's a rhetorical device, a figure of speech. Here it is being used in the Bible.

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth."

And here by Barack Obama.

"...this is a country that can make you proud.

Proud of our people, proud of our history..."

And Bob Dylan.

"If You Gotta Go, Go Now"

You can see how it is structured, and it does add a lot of eloquence to these sayings. The word means something like "folded back" in the original Ancient Greek. In modern Greek double is still diplo (I've often said this in bars) and the ana prefix meant something like "up" or "back" on Ancient Greek.

A related work is diplomat. This started out as Ancient Greek diploma, meaning a folded paper, then a licence, then via Latin and probably French it reached English, having acquired the sense of any kind of official document, and then the meaning widened to the modern sense of an accredited go-between, then to diplomacy as what such persons did, and then to diplomatic on the sense of tactful.

And of course we still give out diplomas in the original sense.

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