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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minutePrepone means to move a planned event or arrangement to an earlier time. It is recognized Indian English, not a mistake—but readers outside India may not know it. If your audience is broad, define it once or say “move to an earlier time.”
What does prepone mean?
To prepone something is to reschedule it for an earlier time than originally planned. It is especially useful as the opposite of postpone: one moves an event earlier, the other later.
For example: “We preponed the meeting from Friday to Thursday.” The meeting now takes place earlier. By contrast, “We postponed the meeting until Monday” means it will take place later.
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary gives the pronunciation /ˌpriːˈpəʊn/ and the regular forms prepones, preponed and preponing. Cambridge Dictionary also records the scheduling sense, with an example involving elections. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary; Cambridge Dictionary.
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Is prepone a real word?
Yes. Oxford and Cambridge both include it in their dictionaries and identify the scheduling sense as Indian English; Oxford also labels it informal. That regional label describes where the word is especially associated, not whether it is legitimate English.
English has vocabulary that is more familiar in some regions than others. A 2015 article by Diksha Madhok, republished by Scroll.in, describes prepone as familiar to many South Asian English speakers and less familiar to some readers elsewhere. Those are the writer’s observations, not a measured estimate of how many people use or understand the word. Scroll.in.
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Can I use prepone in formal English?
Oxford’s “informal” label is a useful cue: in a formal document or a message to an international audience, consider whether readers will recognize the word. The dictionaries establish its meaning and regional label; they do not set one universal rule for every context.
Choose wording for the reader and the situation:
- Use prepone when your audience knows the word and its brevity is helpful.
- Use “move to an earlier time” when you want the direction of the change to be unmistakable.
- Use “bring forward” if it is familiar to your audience and the context makes clear that the event is moving earlier.
For a broad audience, you can also define the word on first use: “We’ll prepone (move earlier) the meeting to Thursday.” That makes the meaning clear without treating the word as an error.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsWhere did the word come from?
The history is not captured by a single simple origin story. Oxford’s current entry gives a concise note: “1970s: from pre- + postpone.” That note concerns the scheduling word and should not be read as proof that no earlier form existed. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.
A 2015 Scroll.in article reports an older sense, “to place in front,” and attributes a 1549 example to Robert Crowley and the Oxford English Dictionary. It also recounts a December 1913 letter to The New York Times in which a reader proposed prepone for moving an appointment earlier, as a counterpart to postpone. These are historical claims reported by that article, rather than direct consultation of the OED here. Scroll.in.
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Shashi Tharoor recounts using the word in 1972 and initially assuming he had coined it. In his essay, he writes: “Well, I’m sorry, but they are wrong. Prepone is an English word.” That is his argument about the word’s legitimacy, not a dictionary ruling. Shashi Tharoor’s essay.
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