To postpone something means to decide it will happen later than originally planned. When a baseball game gets postponed because of rain, the teams don't play that day but will make up the game another time. When your teacher postpones a test from Friday to Monday, you get extra time to study, but the test is still coming.

Postponing is different from canceling. A canceled event won't happen at all, but a postponed event is simply moved to a new date or time. If your family postpones a trip to the beach because someone gets sick, you'll still go once everyone feels better.

People postpone things for good reasons: bad weather, illness, conflicts with other important events, or needing more time to prepare. A city might postpone a festival because of an approaching storm. A student might ask to postpone a make-up lesson because of a doctor's appointment.

Sometimes people postpone things they're dreading or find difficult, pushing them off again and again. If you keep postponing cleaning your room or starting a big project, you're procrastinating, which usually makes things harder in the long run. The key difference is that postponing once for a good reason makes sense, but postponing the same thing repeatedly often means you're just avoiding it.