repeated

1. 1
   adjective

   Said or done again, especially more than once.

   The committee ignored repeated requests for a public hearing.

   Repeated exposure to the noise damaged her hearing over time.

   Similarfrequent, recurrent, recurring, persistent, constant

   Oppositesingle, isolated

   Note

   An adjective that compares with more and most rather than -er and -est: the most repeated complaint, never the repeatedest. It usually sits before its noun, unlike the verb form, and it pairs easily with words of frequency. Rudolf Schuster's The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America (1992) writes of repeated modifications that were themselves 'often repeated', stacking the idea for emphasis.

2. 2
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of repeat.

   The teacher repeated the instructions for the new students.

   They had repeated the experiment several times before publishing the results.

   Note

   The form's job depends on its helper verb. With have it builds the perfect (they had repeated the test), and with be it builds the passive (the warning was repeated). Only the transitive meanings can go passive, so the intransitive 'recur' meaning stays active: the symptoms repeated nightly. As a simple past it needs no helper at all and stands alone as the finite verb.

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