Word.ws English Dictionary

reinvents the wheel

reinvents the wheel is the third-person singular simple present indicative of reinvent the wheel.

Meaning of reinvent the wheel

Verb

reinvent the wheel (third-person singular simple present reinvents the wheel, present participle reinventing the wheel, simple past and past participle reinvented the wheel)

  1. (idiomatic) 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.
    • The trading of information so that people need not reinvent the wheel.1987 August 22, Chris Bull, quoting Craig Harris, “CDC Ripped at Minority AIDS Conference”, in Gay Community News, volume 15, number 6, page 1

Questions about reinvents the wheel

What is reinvents the wheel the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Reinvents the wheel is the third-person singular simple present indicative of reinvent the wheel.

Words near reinvents the wheel in the dictionary

  1. reinventories
  2. reinventors
  3. reinventory
  4. reinventorying
  5. reinvents
  6. reinvents the wheel
  7. reinversion
  8. reinversions
  9. reinvert
  10. reinverted
  11. reinverting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: reinvents the wheel (page history and authors); reinvent the wheel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “reinvents the wheel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/reinvents_the_wheel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.