diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
index 3f6c1a5eb00..139554d18e4 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/CHANGES.txt
@@ -115,6 +115,9 @@ Release 2.4.0 - UNRELEASED
     HADOOP-10198. DomainSocket: add support for socketpair.
     (Colin Patrick McCabe via wang)
 
+    HADOOP-10208. Remove duplicate initialization in StringUtils.getStringCollection.
+    (Benoy Antony via jing9)
+
   OPTIMIZATIONS
 
     HADOOP-9748. Reduce blocking on UGI.ensureInitialized (daryn)
diff --git a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/util/StringUtils.java b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/util/StringUtils.java
index 70ad18f6a4d..dfa8e65df47 100644
--- a/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/util/StringUtils.java
+++ b/hadoop-common-project/hadoop-common/src/main/java/org/apache/hadoop/util/StringUtils.java
@@ -343,7 +343,6 @@ public class StringUtils {
     if (str == null)
       return values;
     StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(str, delim);
-    values = new ArrayList<String>();
     while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
       values.add(tokenizer.nextToken());
     }