Postponed

How to spell postponed

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce postponed

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does postponed mean?

1. verbArranged for something to take place at a later time than originally planned.

Postponed in a sentence

• The wedding was postponed because of the storm.

• Management postponed the product launch until the spring.

Where does postponed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the past tense of 'postpone', which comes directly from the Latin verb postponere, a compound of post, meaning 'after', and ponere, meaning 'to put' or 'to place'. So at root it literally meant 'to put after' or 'to set behind', an idea that maps neatly onto its modern sense of pushing an event back to a later time. English adopted the verb in the early 1500s, when writers also used it to mean valuing one thing less than another, that is, placing it second. The same ponere root, with its noun form positus, gives us a whole family of relatives such as 'position', 'component', 'opponent', and 'deposit'. The spelling holds two separate 'po' clusters, post and pon, which is the part writers most often slip on.

How the word is built

• post- (after)
• pon (put, place, from Latin ponere)
• -ed (past tense)