Definitions

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

  • transitive verb To place (a word or phrasal constituent) after another constituent in a sentence, as the direct object noun phrase all the interesting places he had visited in the sentence He described to them all the interesting places he had visited.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To place after (something else).
  • To postpone; put off.

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

  • transitive verb obsolete To postpone.

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

  • verb grammar To place a word or phrase after another in a sentence, especially in order to modify it
  • verb obsolete To postpone.

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

  • verb place after another constituent in the sentence

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Back-formation from postposition.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

French postposer. See post- and pose.

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Examples

  • Based simply on the forms found, we must conclude with certainty that the word is overwhelmingly a noun since Etruscan adjectives, which postpose the nouns they modify just as in Modern French, for eg., are never declined unless used as nouns by themselves.

    Archive 2009-06-01 2009

  • Based simply on the forms found, we must conclude with certainty that the word is overwhelmingly a noun since Etruscan adjectives, which postpose the nouns they modify just as in Modern French, for eg., are never declined unless used as nouns by themselves.

    Contradictions with authors' accounts of Etruscan word Rasna 2009

  • One article I read said that children stick most closely to SOV order and only later after 10? begin to postpose.

    languagehat.com: JAPANESE SCRAMBLING? 2005

  • I immediately thought of Turkish, which is typologically SOV, but in the colloquial language it's not uncommon to postpose one nominal constituent which may be longer than one word after the verb.

    languagehat.com: JAPANESE SCRAMBLING? 2005

  • Now we are stuck, New Orleans hangs like an albatross around our necks to the point where we have to postpose the convention simply because a hurricane is going to make landfall somewhere in the vicinty of New Orleans.

    Hot Air » Top Picks 2008

  • Now we are stuck, New Orleans hangs like an albatross around our necks to the point where we have to postpose the convention simply because a hurricane is going to make landfall somewhere in the vicinty of New Orleans.

    Hot Air » Top Picks 2008

  • Now we are stuck, New Orleans hangs like an albatross around our necks to the point where we have to postpose the convention simply because a hurricane is going to make landfall somewhere in the vicinty of New Orleans.

    Hot Air » Top Picks 2008

  • Now we are stuck, New Orleans hangs like an albatross around our necks to the point where we have to postpose the convention simply because a hurricane is going to make landfall somewhere in the vicinty of New Orleans.

    Hot Air » Top Picks 2008

  • Myhome is in foreclosure. given the state of the economy, why don’t they postpose all foreclosues until the economy gets a bit more stable…it would keep me in my home if I could work with the lender and they wouldn’t get my home back – it could be good for everyone.

    ON THE RADAR: Wednesday 2008

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