word usage - Is "prepone" being used outside India?


Prepone is a great word - it's the opposite of postpone. When you prepone a meeting, you change its scheduled time so that it occurs sooner than originally planned. Has his usage spread beyond India? Would other English speakers understand it?



Answer



There is exactly one incidence for prepone in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, from this Christian Science Monitor article, which reads:



IN India, people created the word “prepone” as the obvious opposite of postpone. On the Internet, a form of cyber-English has sprouted with such words as “net-surfing.”



(I hope it surprises no one that this citation is from 1995—eons ago in Internet time).


More recently, in 2008 the Monitor published this article discussing prepone in much more detail.


So it does not appear that prepone has much currency outside of India. I have heard it in my day-to-day business on occasion here in the United States in the software development industry—from my colleagues from India.


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