Dilatory

 WORD OF THE DAY

dilatory / adjective / DILL-uh-tor-ee

Definition
1: tending or intended to cause delay
2a: characterized by procrastination
2b: tardy

Examples
"Members of Congress from both parties are raising tough questions about this dilatory pace."
— William A. Galston, The Wall Street Journal, 24 May 2022

Near the end of the meeting on Tuesday, Allard stopped testimony by raising a point of information and asking a series of procedural questions, a move LaFrance said was dilatory.
— Emily Goodykoontz, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Oct. 2021

Did You Know?
“Slow down, you move too fast / You got to make the morning last / Just kicking down the cobblestones / Looking for fun and feelin'…” dilatory?
We can’t say Paul Simon was wrong to choose groovy to end that verse of “The 59th Street Bridge Song” but dilatory would have also made sense.
You see, if procrastination is your style, dilatory is the word for you.
It’s been describing things that cause delay since at least the 15th century, and its ancestors were hanging around with similar meanings long before that. The word's source is dilatus, a form of the multifaceted Latin verb differre, meaning "to carry away in varying directions, spread abroad, postpone, delay, be unlike or distinct."
That verb is also an ancestor of the words different, differ, and defer—a fact we think is pretty groovy.