What is Prepone?
1.
Function: transitive verb
Inflected forms: pre•poned; pre•pon•ing
Etymology: Latin preponere to place before, prepone, from pre- + ponere to place -- more at POSITION
Date: Has been in use in urban English spoken in India since at least the 1950s
To advance an event or activity to an earlier time. The closest American usage is “to advance” the timing of something. The word came into vogue in urban India as the opposite of “postponing” something.
“To make sure we get to enjoy the fireworks display that starts promptly at 9 PM, let us prepone the dinner engagement to 7 rather than 8 tomorrow evening”
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2.
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): pre·poned; pre·pon·ing
Etymology: Latin preponere to place before, prepone, from pre- + ponere to place -- more at POSITION
Date: circa 2003, Providence RI
1 : to put off to an earlier time : pre-DEFER
2 a : to place earlier (as in a sentence) than the normal position in English <prepone an adjective> b : to place earlier in order of precedence, preference, or importance.
Jonas, Peter and Rowena scheduled a meeting for 11:00, but Sam preponed it to 10:00 due to an impending etymology debate.
3.
It's the opposite to postponed. When one has made an appointment and needs to make it earlier rather than later.
Hi Peter, Can we "prepone" our 5pm meeting today to 3pm? I have another engagement that has come up.
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4.
A backformation created from the word "postpone," created by replacing "post" with "pre" to convey a nebulous sense of what the user has in mind with respect to sequential or temporal placement of something. A non-word with a limited currency in technically oriented circles, has yet to gain widespread or consistent use in authoritative dictionaries considered to uphold legitimate standards of usage by linguistically or verbally sophisticated language users, who think it rebarbative. Some nonauthorities subscribe to the school of thought that the word is formed from the eating of corn pone, biscuit-like food commonly eaten at breakfast by industrious tillers of the soil in rural regions of the U.S., who couldn't always wait for the corn pone to finish baking before eating it, necessitating their eating of "prepone" for breakfast. With migration trends tending to flow from countryside to city, prepone came to be adopted for more loose or general use to refer to things that occur before originally planned.
1. "Discussion of having writing training for our engineers so the clarity and style of their writing will equal their elevated intelligence and contribution to our company, has been preponed from next week's agenda to this week." 2. "Doggone it Ma, I gots to mosey on down to the field - jes fetch me some prepone an' I'll be gittin' on."
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