Vocabulary
Can You Prepone a Meeting? Indian English Vocabulary
If postpone means to put something off, prepone means to bring it forward. The word is ordinary in Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan English and almost unused in Britain or North America, where people say “bring it forward” or “move it up”.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
Can you “prepone” a meeting — bring it forward to an earlier time?
The opposite of postpone. Established in Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan English; rare elsewhere.
- Yes — “prepone” is a normal word
- No — I would say “bring it forward”
- Something else
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
Yes — “prepone” is a normal word
Expected in 4 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.