Postseason

How to spell postseason

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce postseason

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does postseason mean?

1. nounThe period of playoff or championship games that takes place after a sport's regular schedule has finished.
2. adjectiveRelating to the playoff games held after the regular schedule.

Postseason in a sentence

• noun

  The team qualified for the postseason with a win on the final day.

• adjective

  The coach reviewed every postseason game from the previous year.

• noun

  An injury kept their best player out of the entire postseason.

• adjective

  Their postseason record has been poor despite strong regular campaigns.

Where does postseason come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound built from the Latin prefix post-, meaning literally 'after' or 'behind', joined to the noun season. Season itself reached English through Old French seson and traces back to the Latin satio, which originally meant 'a sowing' and so 'the time for sowing', from the verb serere, 'to sow'. Over centuries season broadened from the planting time to any defined stretch of the year, including the fixed competitive periods of organised sport. The combined term postseason arose in American English in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to name the playoff games that follow the regular schedule. Because it is a clean prefix-plus-word join with no dropped or doubled letters, the spelling is regular; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not hyphenated.

How the word is built

• post- (after)
• season (a recurring period of the year, here a sporting calendar)