Other forms: postpones, postponed, postponing, postponement
To postpone something is to move it to a later time. The match is postponed, the wedding is postponed, the decision is postponed until Thursday.
The thing still exists — that is the whole difference between postponing and cancelling, and it is the mistake to avoid. Postponed means later; cancelled means never. It is a little formal, so in speech people often say put off or push back instead. The noun is postponement, which is stiff enough that most people simply say delay.
1verbpostponeTo move an event to a later time.~66%
“The meeting has been postponed until the fifteenth.”
2verbputTo put off doing something.~34%
“He postponed the phone call for as long as he decently could.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 106 sentences found in the wild and placed 105 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: put off
POST-pone → POST it
You write MEETING on a box, put a stamp on it, and post it. It arrives next Tuesday.
hooks ontopost
Latin post, after, and ponere, to place — to put a thing after. Its cousins are everywhere: position, compose, deposit, all from the same verb for placing.
Proto-Indo-European
*tḱey-
Latin
postpōnō — to put after; to postpone
English, today
postpone
Built from
From Latin postpōnō (“to put after; to postpone”) from post (“after”) + pōnō (“to put; to place”), compare forestall.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA