Meaning of reinvent the wheel | Babel Free

Definitions

To do work unnecessarily when it has already been done satisfactorily by others; to attempt to devise a solution to a problem when a solution already exists.

idiomatic

Equivalents

Examples

“The trading of information so that people need not reinvent the wheel.”

“A narrative circulates at Mitchell, Hall about a naive young employee who, in his eagerness to be creative, "reinvents the wheel," devoting so many hours reformulating work that has already been done that he drives himself into a nervous breakdown.”

“[…] I do not want to make inflated claims for the methodological or conceptual novelty of a certain school or group of writers. Claims to historiographical significance set in a methodological key too often turn out to be claims to have reinvented the wheel. On the contrary, what follows is intended merely to provide some account of the current state of historiographical play in the interpretative aftermath of what has come to be called revisionism and to use the figure of Wentworth to do so.”

“Evidently, the trend in security applications is to reinvent the wheel, or in this case, to reinvent the directory service.”

“Overprocessing. The big problem in this area is a lack of standardization. A lot of time is spent reinventing the wheel. There are a lot of similar activities, and the lead time (set-up time) for reinventing the process should be eliminated.”

“But although AFI (The Blood Album) doesn't reinvent the wheel, it doesn’t need to: The record illustrates that the members of AFI are deeply committed to forward motion, and remain as fired up now as they were 25 years ago.”

CEFR level