repeats

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of repeat.

   He repeats the same joke at every family dinner.

   The machine repeats the cycle whenever the timer resets.

   Note

   Here the verb works both with and without an object. With one, it means doing or saying something again (she repeats the question). Without one, it means recurring on its own (the pattern repeats every few bars). Watchmaking keeps a special intransitive use as well: a watch that repeats strikes the hours.

   The pattern repeats every four bars.

   If you ignore the alarm, the chime repeats after five minutes.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of repeat.

   Summer schedules are full of repeats from earlier seasons.

   Most of tonight's lineup turned out to be repeats.

   Note

   The noun plural carries every countable use of repeat at once: reruns on a summer schedule, refills of a prescription, copies of a sequence scattered through a genome, the marks in a score that send players back to an earlier passage. Context decides which one is meant. The same spelling also serves the verb's present tense, so the repeats is a noun while it repeats is a verb.

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