Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or an instance of delaying or putting off.
  • noun Officially sanctioned postponement of compulsory military service.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A putting off; postponement.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun rare The act of delaying; postponement.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An act or instance of deferring or putting off.
  • noun Officially sanctioned postponement of compulsory military service.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun act of putting off to a future time

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

defer +‎ -ment

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word deferment.

Examples

  • From the Boston Globe: As the Vietnam War raged in the 1960s, Mitt Romney received a deferment from the draft as a Mormon "minister of religion" for the duration of his missionary work in France, which lasted two and a half years.

    Mr. Romney Deferred 2007

  • My plans were thwarted by an unfortunate war and to assure deferment from the military, I found myself a misplaced medical student at Johns

    Richard Axel - Autobiography 2005

  • "Howard Dean was granted a deferment from the military after showing up at a recruitment office with an x-ray indicating he had a bad back," the voice-of-God narrator says.

    Dumb and Dumber 2004

  • "Howard Dean was granted a deferment from the military after showing up at a recruitment office with an x-ray indicating he had a bad back," the voice-of-God narrator says.

    Dumb and Dumber 2004

  • Mr. Dean grew up on Park Avenue in an old aristocratic family, and after getting his medical deferment from the draft, he moved to Aspen to ski.

    December 2003 2003

  • My teaching at Yale seemingly warranted an indefinite deferment from the Vietnam War draft.

    Joseph E. Stiglitz - Autobiography 2002

  • Back in 1968, I was one of the many naive "smart-kid" high school graduates lucky enough to nail a scholarship to college that brought with it a deferment from the draft.

    Loveletters from Vol 11 1968

  • It’s OK to take newly arrived border crossers who will not contest deportation but people who will ask for a hardship deferment is something else.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Why the Arizona Law is Much Worse than the Federal Law It is Supposedly Based On 2010

  • With subsidized loans, the federal government pays the interest on a loan while the student is in school, during the grace period after graduation or if the loan is in deferment, which is when borrowers are temporarily allowed to stop making payments.

    New Rules for Loans 2010

  • "It was either leave the country, get drafted, or find a job with a critical-skills deferment, which is what I did," he says.

    Inflated Credentials Surface in Executive Suite 2008

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.