to reinvent the wheel
9
5.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
reinventar la rueda
- We don't need to reinvent the wheel because there's already an effective solution available.
- avoid reinventing the wheel
- reinventing the wheel every time
Well, they're not just reinventing the wheel here, more like polishing it.
- Well, they're not just reinventing the wheel here, more like polishing it.
- We are no longer having to reinvent the wheel from the very beginning.
- And they kept trying to reinvent the wheel within their current business.
- And so you we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
- Why is it that you're constantly trying to reinvent the wheel?
- Finally, I mean, it's not like we reinvented the wheel here.
- Now, to be clear, I wasn't expecting Apple to reinvent the wheel here.
- The hiring I've done in the past was mostly through tools that we built ourselves, but reinventing the wheel was painful.
- And only if you find the proper balance, then it means that you do not need to reinvent the wheel over and over again.
- Oh, and let me just mention with the killer follow up plan, you do not need to reinvent the wheel, right?
- If there's one lesson that SANCAT should have learned from Synapse, it's that you don't always have to reinvent the wheel.
- If you think about it, if we didn't have memory, we would constantly keep reinventing the wheel and there'd be an awful lot of Groundhog Days.
- We literally tackle this and actually reinvent the wheel for high quality men.
- This is the type of knowledge that right now that I'm talking about and that I am thinking about when I say you do not need to reinvent the wheel.
Examples
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Two advanced organizations like EMBRAPA and ARS should collaborate rather than each reinventing the wheel.
Academic text (2001) -
It's like really good smart people reinvent the wheel all the time in the social sector.
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We are no longer having to reinvent the wheel from the very beginning.
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And they kept trying to reinvent the wheel within their current business.
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Rock and roll has been going on for 50 years, and we're still trying to reinvent the wheel.
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There is no need to reinvent the wheel.
Academic text (2011) -
Thank goodness, for example, that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we make something.
Blog text (31) -
"You don't have to reinvent the wheel," notes Cook, who founded the Joint Custody Association in 1979.
Academic text (1998) -
In institutional terms, judges also conserve scarce resources when they avoid reinventing the wheel.
Academic text (2017) -
The moral of this story is, don't reinvent the wheel in attempting to assess new standards and curricula.
Academic text (2001)
Antonyms
How Wasteful
Surface Forms
Morphology
reinvent + the + wheel
The meaning is directly inferable from 'reinvent' (to create or devise again) plus 'the wheel' (a prototypical/basic invention): recreating the wheel clearly suggests needlessly recreating something that already exists. This metaphor is common across many languages and follows a straightforward compositional logic, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents should be able to understand the idiom.
Etymology
Reinvent the wheel comes from the simple picture of someone trying to reinvent a wheel that already works instead of using it. That image shows 'wasting time and effort' on something that 'already exists', so the phrase warns against doing needless work.