Other forms: delays, delayed, delaying
A delay is the gap between when something should have happened and when it does. The 8:15 sitting at the platform with nothing on the board, a parcel that was due on Tuesday, forty minutes on the runway waiting for a slot.
Delay works in both directions as a verb: something delays you, and you delay doing something. A signal failure delays the train; you delay telling your parents until Sunday evening. Delayed is the word that goes up on the departures board, and the noun collects adjectives in front of it — a slight delay, a long delay, a further delay of two hours. Keep it apart from postpone: you postpone a meeting to a new date you have chosen, while a delay is something that happens to you. And without delay is a set phrase meaning at once, at home in letters and instructions rather than in conversation.
1noundelayExtra time spent waiting for something that should already have happened.~57%
“There were long delays on the motorway all morning.”
synonyms: hold-up, wait
2verbhappenTo make something happen later than it should.~32%
“Snow delayed every flight out of the airport.”
3verbputTo put off doing something until later.~11%
“Do not delay paying the bill or they add a charge.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 146 sentences found in the wild and placed 126 of them on a sense (20 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The Old French verb inside delay is laier, to leave, and the Germanic word behind that, *latjaną, meant to hinder or to stall. So a delay is a thing left lying rather than a thing stopped — which is why late, leave, and let in its old sense of hinder are all relatives of it. Dally is the same word again, arriving in English by another road.
Proto-Indo-European
*leh₁d- — to leave, leave behind
Proto-Germanic
*latjaną — to delay, hinder, stall
Frankish
*lattjan
Old French
laier — to leave
Anglo-Norman
delaier
Middle English
delaien
English, today
delay
From Middle English delaien, borrowed from Anglo-Norman delaier, Old French deslaier, from des- + Old French laier (“to leave”), a conflation of Old Frankish lattjan "to delay, hinder"; from Proto-Germanic latjaną (“to delay, hinder, stall”), from Proto-Indo-European leh₁d- (“to leave, leave behind”), and Old Frankish laibijan "to leave"; from Proto-Germanic laibijaną (“to leave, cause to stay”), from Proto-Indo-European leyp- (“to remain, continue”). a doublet of dally. Akin to Old English latian (“to delay, hesitate”), Old English latu (“a delay, a hindrance”), Old English lǣfan (“to leave”). More at let (to hinder), late, leave.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA