Deferred

How to spell deferred

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce deferred

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does deferred mean?

1. verbPast tense of defer: put off or postponed an action or event to a later time.
2. adjectiveDescribing something held back or scheduled for a later time, especially a payment, tax, or benefit.

Deferred in a sentence

• verb

  The board deferred the vote until the budget was finalised.

• adjective

  The company reported a large deferred tax liability in its annual accounts.

• verb

  She deferred her university place for a year so she could work and save.

• adjective

  The retailer offered a deferred payment plan with nothing due for six months.

Where does deferred come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past form of the verb 'defer', which actually carries two Latin verbs inside it that English eventually merged. The 'postpone' meaning descends from Latin differre, formed from dis- 'apart' and ferre 'to carry', so literally 'to carry apart' and so to delay; the 'yield or submit' meaning comes from deferre, from de- 'down' and the same ferre, meaning 'to carry down' and so to bring before or hand over. Both reached English through Old French in the 1300s and 1400s and settled on the single spelling 'defer'. The shared root ferre 'to carry' also sits inside everyday words such as 'transfer', 'refer' and 'infer'. The spelling trap in 'deferred' is the doubled r: because the stress falls on the final syllable, fer, the consonant doubles before -ed, a rule it shares with 'referred' and 'preferred'.

How the word is built

• de- (down, away)
• fer (from Latin ferre: to carry)
• -red (doubled final r before the past-tense -ed)