rerun
Television networks often rerun rerun episodes to fill programming gaps.
The sentence describes how television networks broadcast already-aired episodes again to fill empty programming slots.
Meanings
to broadcast or screen something again, typically a previously shown program
- The network reran the finale due to popular demand.
- They rerun classic episodes every Sunday.
a repeat broadcast of a television or radio program
- Summer is rerun season for most networks.
- He's seen every rerun of that show.
Word origin
A modern English compound: re- ('again') + run ('a continuous broadcast or showing'). The verb-noun stress alternation is a 20th-century English innovation — when a verb and a noun are nearly identical compounds, English often gives them different stresses to mark them as distinct words. The same pattern produces 'rerun' (verb /riːˈrʌn/, noun /ˈriːrʌn/), 'rewrite', 'remake', 'remix'.
Fun fact
Television gave English a whole class of 're-' compounds — 'rerun', 'remake', 'rebroadcast', 'remix', 'reboot', 'reissue' — each with the same verb-noun stress shift pattern. The pattern shows that the trochaic noun rule (front-stress on nouns, end-stress on verbs) is still actively productive in 20th- and 21st-century English coinages, not just inherited from Latin.