Language: en
Meaning: (idiomatic)To doworkunnecessarilywhen it has already been donesatisfactorilyby others; to attempt todeviseasolutionto aproblemwhen a solution alreadyexists.1987August 22, Chris Bull, quoting Craig Harris, “CDC Ripped at Minority AIDS Conference”, inGay Community News, volume15, number 6, page 1:The trading of information so that people need notreinvent the wheel.1993, Marsha Witten, “Narrative and the Culture of Obedience at the Workplace”, in Dennis K. Mumby, editor,Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives(Sage Annual Reviews of Communications Research;21), Newbury Park, Calif.; London:SAGE Publications,→ISBN,page108: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.1996, Peter Lake, “Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-revisionist Perspective”, in J. F. Merritt, editor,The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, 1st paperback edition, Cambridge:University of Cambridge,→ISBN,pages252–253:[…]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 havereinvented 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.2000August 28, Dave Kearns, “Directory Services: Let’s not reinvent the wheel”, inNetwork World, volume17, number35, Southborough, Mass.:Network World, Inc.,→ISSN,→OCLC,page22:Evidently, the trend in security applications is toreinvent the wheel, or in this case, to reinvent the directory service.2012, Gerhard J[ohannes]Plenert, “How Can Lean Help IT?”, inLean Management Principles for Information Technology(Series on Resource Management), Boca Raton, Fla.:CRC Press,→ISBN, table 5.4 (The 7 Wastes in IT),page129:Overprocessing. The big problem in this area is a lack of standardization. A lot of time is spentreinventing the wheel. There are a lot of similar activities, and the lead time (set-up time) for reinventing the process should be eliminated.2017January 20, Annie Zaleski, “AFI Sounds Refreshed and Rejuvenated on Its 10th Album,AFI (The Blood Album)”, inThe A.V. Club[1], archived fromthe originalon10 September 2017:But althoughAFI (The Blood Album)doesn'treinvent the wheel, it doesn’t need to: The record illustrates that the members ofAFIare deeply committed to forward motion, and remain as fired up now as they were 25 years ago.
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