As you stress on "repeat the array ... rather than repeat each element", you may want to consider tile as well: >>> np.tile(a, [10,1]) array([[0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 2]])