Postal

How to spell postal

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce postal

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does postal mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the mail service or the sending of letters and parcels.

Postal in a sentence

• The parcel was returned because of an incorrect postal code.

• Postal charges have risen sharply since last year.

Where does postal come from?

Language of origin: French

This adjective traces back through French to the Latin verb ponere, meaning 'to place' or 'to set down', and specifically its past participle positus, 'placed'. In medieval times a 'post' was a station along a road where fresh horses were kept ready, so that riders carrying letters could be relayed onward quickly; the word for the placed station gradually came to mean the letter-carrying service itself. Italian posta and French poste both carried this sense of an organised relay for mail, and the French adjective postal, 'relating to the post', was adopted into English in the early nineteenth century as official mail services expanded. The same ponere root sits inside everyday words such as 'position', 'deposit', and 'compose'. The spelling is reassuringly regular: it is simply the familiar noun 'post' with '-al' added, so the main thing to remember is the single t and the plain '-al' ending.

How the word is built

• post (the mail system, from a relay station where horses were 'placed')
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)