As Merriam-Webster notes, to prepone meaning “to move to an earlier time” is widely used by India's English speakers, but largely unheard outside the subcontinent.
Interestingly, the term was used as far back as the early 1500s with a slightly different meaning, “to place in front of, to set before,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s an example from a religious text from 1549:
- I do prepone and set the Lord alwaye before myne eyes.
The first usage instance in the current sense appears to be from a New York Times article in 1913, according to the following site:
To the editor of the New York Times: For the benefit mainly of the legal profession in this age of hurry and bustle may I be permitted to coin the word ‘PREPONE’ as a needed rival of that much revered and oft-invoked standby, ‘postpone.’ John J. D. Trenor, New York, Dec. 5, 1913— ‘New York Times,’ 7 December
Trenor is clearly proposing a neologism, which, in my opinion, might have been inspired by common foreign counterparts such as the French préposer, the Italian preporre.
The same site suggests also that:
Barring a few stray examples, most of the citations I've found online are from the '80s onwards and almost all from India. Wiktionary has this line from a 1984 New York Times piece on Indian English:
- "It is better to make the booking for Tuesday rather than Wednesday so that later you would not have to prepone it," the reservations clerk said with what seemed unassailable linguistic logic.
All this indicates that prepone had entered common usage here by the '80s, and was seen as a typically Indian expression.
(dickandgarlick.blogspot.com)
Given the above information, I'd like to know if the current common usage of prepone in Indian English is actually derived from the few AmE usage instances of the early 20th century, or if, it has an origin on its own, unrelated to both older usages.
What actually sparked the usage of "prepone" in Indian English from the '80s onward?
Best Answer
Old dictionaries on 'postpone' and related terms
The words prepone and postpone have been appearing in tandem in English texts for a long time. Their meanings. however, are not what they once were. The surprise here may be the change in postpone. Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words, or a Generall Dictionary (1658) doesn't mention prepone, but has this entry for postpone:
The noun form of postpone, Phillips reports, is postposure:
It is easy to see how "to put off doing until a later time" evolved from this earlier meaning of postpone through the application of "esteeming less" or "setting behind [or below]" some other thing to the doing of the less favored thing; ultimately, setting something behind something else temporally could readily come to mean not doing it now, but still intending to do it later.
In any case, Phillips seems to have taken his definition of postpone directly from the entry for postpono in Thomas Thomasius, Dictionarium Lingvæ Latinæ et Anglicanæ (1644):
Elisha Coles, An English Dictionary: Explaining the Difficult Terms That Are Used... (1676) includes postpose as a variant form of postpone:
Like Phillips, Coles has no entry for prepone—but he does offer one for prepose:
It thus seems that, in the second half of the seventeenth century, at least some writers had a general sense that prepone (or prepose) and postpone (or postpose) could function as opposites with regard to placement—either physical or in terms of esteem—although no sense had yet emerged in either word with regard to temporal placement.
We see the bridge to the modern sense of postpone partially built in John Kersey, Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1706):
The notion of neglect contains an essential element of time, as it indicates a failure to attend to a thing over some passage of time. Significantly, Kersey doesn't mention postpose, postposure, prepose, or prepone—omissions that free postpone to evolve without being explicitly tied to these terms. The breakthrough then comes with Thomas Dyche & William Pardon, A New General English Dictionary (1735):
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1756) affirms the shift in meaning, making the temporal one the first definition:
The quotation from Dryden comes from his poem "The Hind and the Panther" (1701), and clearly has a temporal aspect. Johnson includes a brief entry for prepose as well ("To PREPOSE. ... To put before."), but he offers nothing for prepone. And his second definition of postpone specifically associates that meaning with evaluation, rather than with physical placement, which might have suggested a closer tie between postpone and postposition (the counterpart of preposition).
'Prepone' and 'postpone' in the 1600s
As elaborated above, postpone in the seventeenth century referred to positioning or esteeming something behind or below something else. It would follow that prepone in this same era meant positioning or esteeming something in front of or above something else. It is in those senses of the two words that we should understand instances where both occur together in writings of this period. I found three such instances from the 1600s. From Richard Ward, Theologicall Qvestions, Dogmaticall Observations, and Evangelicall Essays, vpon The Gospel of Jesus Christ, According to St. Matthew (1640):
This instance is quoted in William Prynne, Canterburies doome, or, The first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-bishop of Canterbury (1646), which Dan Bron cites in a comment beneath Laurel's answer.
The second instance is from The Unerring and Unerrable Church, Or, an Answer to a Sermon Preached by Mr. Andrew Sall, formerly a Iesuit, and now a Minister of the Protestant Church (1675):
The third instance is from George Mackenzie, Scotland's Herauldrie (1680), describing King Charles I's establishment of the Order of Baronet in Scotland in 1625:
This last example uses prepone and postpone in an especially physical sense, as of appending something before or appending it after the thing one started with. Thus, Mackenzie says, starting with the name A. B., we prepone Sir and postpone Baronet to it.
Later instances where 'prepone' and 'postpone' occur in tandem
Looking through search results between 1750 and 1980, I found several instances where the terms appear in tandem.
From "Churchill agt. Dibben" (1753[?]), in The English Reports, volume 96, King's Bench Division 25 (1909):
The legal sense of preponed in the example above is more or less "put before" or "put forward first," but the exact sense of the term isn't obvious, given the technical complications of the will or estate in which it is involved from one case to another. In any event, prepone appears with some frequency in legal analysis of testators' intentions in the middle 1700s.
From Charles Leadbetter, The Royal Gauger; Or, Gauging Made Perfectly Easy (1755):
From Johann Zimmermann, A Grammatical Sketch of the Akra- Or Gã-Language, volume 1 (1858):
Here and in the Leadbetter quotation, as in King Charles's creation of Scottish baronets earlier, preponing and postponing seem centrally concerned with the placement of words or word elements in relation to the central or core name or word. Notably, Zimmermann uses preponed on five other occasions in this book to indicate forward positioning of word components.
From W. Shaw, "Notices and Actions of Removal under the Sheriff Courts (Scotland) Act 1907 (7 Ed. VII. cap. 51)," in The Scots Law Times (July 4, 1908):
From "Doings of the Director," in Onward: The Journal of the Universalist Young People (June 24, 1921):
Here we have a thoroughly modern use of preponed as an intentional opposite of postponed in a scheduling sense. It is indistinguishable in intention from the 1913 New York Times instance noted in the original question.
Instances of 'prepone' between 1750 and 1913
Although the OED, according to Laurel, has no citations for prepone between 1750 and 1913, various database searches turn up several. From "Worsley versus Earl of Granville, July 9, 1751," in Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery, in the Time of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, from the Year 1746–7 to 1755, third edition (1788):
From John Mathews, A Treatise on the Law of Portions and Provisions for Children of the Nature of Portions (1829):
From George Jeremy, A Treatise on the Equity Jurisdiction of the High Court of Chancery, second American edition (1840):
From Proteus, Social Influences: or Villiers, volume 1 (1846):
From A. Bourquin, "Dharmasindhu, or the Ocean of Religious Rites, by the Priest Kashianatha," read November 8, 1882, published in Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society (1883):
This last instance is quite interesting because (1) it was published in India, and (2) it uses prepone to mean something very much like "reschedule forward."
Non-Indian instances of 'prepone' after 1913
I found a number of instances of prepone in non-Indian usage between 1913 and 1980. Here is a sampling. From Maurice Kelly, "Milton's Use of 'Begot in 'Paradise Lost' V, 603," in Studies in Philology (1941):
From Social Science (June 1952) [combined snippets]:
From Central Conference of American Rabbis, CCAR Journal, issues 1–14 (1953) [combined snippets]:
From "Childhood Cancer (Tumors, Leukemia, & Hodgkin's Disease)," in Wilburt Davison & Jeana Levinthal, The Compleat Pediatrician: Practical Diagnostic, Therapeutic and Preventive Pediatrics (1957) [combined snippets]:
From Thomas Middleton, unidentified article in World magazine (July 4, 1972) [combined snippets]:
Early Indian instances of 'prepone'
From All India Reporter, part 7 (1929):
From All India Reporter, issue 6 (1960) [combined snippets]:
From Bulletin of the Indian Society for Malaria & Other Communicable Diseases, volumes 3–4 (1966):
From Central Food Technological Research Institute (India), Annual Report (1968):
From the Indian Journal of Medical Education, volume 10 (1971) [combined snippets]:
From the [New Delhi] Public Enterprise Recorder, volume 3 (1971) [combined snippets]:
And from India Parliament, House of the People, Lok Sabha Debates (1972) [combined snippets]:
Conclusions
Although dictionaries have given scant attention to prepone and its close relatives over the years, and although the OED evidently treats it as having died out in its original sense of "put forward" around the middle of the eighteenth century and treats its more recent meaning of "reschedule to occur sooner than originally planned" as being primarily an Indian English word of the past forty years, book and periodical databases yield quite a few matches—including between 1750 and 1913.
With regard to user240918's original questions:
1. Is the current common usage of prepone in Indian English derived from the few AmE usage instances of the early 20th century, or did it originate on its own, unrelated to older usages?
English writers have treated prepone and postpone as natural complements (and often, opposites) for hundreds of years. I found unique instances of such oppositional usage in texts from 1640, 1675, 1680, 1753, 1755, 1858, 1908, 1921, 1953, 1968, 1971, and 1972 (twice); and user240918 quotes a 1913 instance that the OED cites. The main split in complementary meanings is between the "set in front/above" and "set behind/below" pair of the period from 1640 to 1908 and the "rescheduled to an earlier time" and "rescheduled to a later time" pair of the period from 1913 to the present.
Some vestigial memory of the earlier sense of prepone may have influenced the U.S. writers who first used the word in its modern sense. I think it's more likely, though, that each of them—in 1913, 1921, 1953, and 1972—independently (and with varying degrees of enthusiasm) arrived at prepone as a potential single word meaning "reschedule to an earlier time."
Meanwhile, prepone continued to appear (rarely) in mid-twentieth-century writing in its old sense of "put forward, advance, or accelerate," especially as a medical term.
2. What actually sparked the usage of "prepone" in Indian English from the '80s onward?
The first India-related instance of prepone that I found is from a translation of Dharmasindhu, published in 1883 in Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Asiatic Society. However, the next instance I found of prepone (in the same sense) in Indian English was from 1960, a gap of 77 years. Further complicating the picture are instances in Indian English texts from 1929 (law) and 1971 (medicine) that use prepone in its older, nonscheduling sense of "put forward."
Instances of prepone in the scheduling sense appear with increasing frequency after the 1960 instance. But evidently, from the banter about "poning" in the 1972 Indian Parliamentary debates, the term was not well established in everyday speech even at that date. I couldn't find a triggering cause for popular adoption of the term in Indian English, but the usage was clearly gaining strength by the very early 1970s.