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Allin

postpone

verbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//pəʊstˈpəʊn//
  • Canada//poʊstˈpoʊn//
  • Australia//pəʉstˈpəʉn//
  • Australia/[pɐʉstˈpɐʉn]/
  • New Zealand//pɐʉstˈpɐʉn//

To delay or put off an event, appointment, etc.

verb

  1. 1

    To delay or put off an event, appointment, etc.

    “[…] Churchill, my dear fellow, we have such greedy sharks, and wolves in lamb's clothing. Oh, dear, there's so much to tell you, so many warnings to give you, but all that must be postponed for the moment.”

    Significant rail projects have been mothballed before in the face of changed circumstances – in particular, the LNER Woodhead project which was postponed due to wartime conditions and not revived until 1948, as money became available after nationalisation.

  2. 2

    obsoleteTo place after in order; to deem less important.

    Why should the See of Antioch, that most ancient and truly Apostolical Church, where the Christian name began […] be postponed to Alexandria?

Etymology

From Latin postpōnō (“to put after; to postpone”) from post (“after”) + pōnō (“to put; to place”), compare forestall.

Forms

past tense
postponed
past participle
postponed
present participle
postponing
third person singular
postpones
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).