Surely you’re familiar with procrastination. Maybe you’re even learning new words as a method of procrastination. Now you can feel good about your delays because you’ve learned a new adjective for these tricks — “dilatory.” While one definition of “dilatory” includes a similar word, “delay,” there’s no clear etymological relation between the two. “Dilatory” can be traced to the Latin “dilatorius,” meaning “extending or putting off time,” and “delay” comes from the Old French “delaier,” meaning “to postpone or defer.”