attrition vs redundancy

attrition

noun
  • A gradual, natural reduction in membership or personnel, as through retirement, resignation, or death. 

  • Grinding down or wearing away by friction. 

  • Imperfect contrition or remorse. 

  • The gradual reduction in a tangible or intangible resource due to causes that are passive and do not involve productive use of the resource. 

  • The loss of participants during an experiment. 

  • The wearing of teeth due to their grinding. 

  • The loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language. 

verb
  • To reduce the number of (jobs or workers) by not hiring new employees to fill positions that become vacant (often with out). 

  • To undergo a reduction in number. 

  • To grind or wear down through friction. 

redundancy

noun
  • The state of being redundant 

  • Duplication of parts of a message to guard against transmission errors. 

  • surplusage inserted in a pleading which may be rejected by the court without impairing the validity of what remains. 

  • A superfluity; something redundant or excessive; a needless repetition in language 

  • Duplication of components or circuits to provide survival of the total system in case of failure of single components. 

  • The state of being unemployed because one's job is no longer necessary; the dismissal of such an employee; a layoff. 

How often have the words attrition and redundancy occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )