Apparently It Is a Word

[faustus]

De-duplicate.

"In order to de-duplicate effort and to ensure that we offer the best experience to all our users, the old telephone directory has been removed."

Comments

[ticking-fool.livejournal.com]

Somebody, somewhere, has to suffer for that.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I know language isn't fixed but this is so double plus ungood.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

De-duplicate is certainly a word in my industry. It's used to describe the process of removing duplicate entries - for example if you have recorded a customer twice under similar addresses and you want to make sure that all orders point to one of the customers.

But in the context you have it here - that's just wrong!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I can see that - but remove duplicate records would be less ugly! The example I give is even less elegant.

[bookzombie.livejournal.com]

What you have to bear in mind that in my context this is technical terminology, not English; think of it as an engineering term.

It's not a new coinage, by the way, it's been around for the whole 20 plus years I've been working in IT.

It should never be used in an non-technical context, though!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

That's fair enough. It hasn't made it into Chambers yet though.

People make much the same comments about - say - concretisation, sytagmatic and so forth in LitCrit. That too is technical talk, and not (necessarily) aimed at outsiders.

I don't think I'd object to reduplicate, mind. Deduplicate sounds too much like a stutter to me.