Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Postmark for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Postmark" — noun, pronounced /ˈpəʊstmɑːk/, with the stress on "post".
Narrator: A postmark is the official mark stamped on a letter or parcel by the postal service, showing the place and date of posting.
Narrator: In plain English, it is the inky circle the post office prints over your stamp to say when and where your letter began its journey.
Narrator: The word is a simple compound of post, meaning the mail service, and mark, meaning a printed sign, and it has been used in English since the eighteenth century.
Narrator: A common collocation is a clear postmark, which describes an impression legible enough to prove the date of posting.
Narrator: It differs from a stamp, because a stamp is the label you buy and stick on, while a postmark is the cancellation applied afterwards by the postal service itself.
Narrator: It is also used as a verb, as in a letter postmarked in Edinburgh, and figuratively for anything that bears the date and place of its origin.
Narrator: Postal services, legal offices, tax authorities, auction houses and stamp collectors all rely on the postmark as evidence of timing.
Narrator: So remember: a postmark is the dated, placed mark that proves when a piece of mail entered the system.
Speaker A: Why does the post office bother printing that smudgy circle over my stamp?
Speaker B: Because it is proof of timing! POSTMARK comes straight from post, the old word for the mail relay, and mark, a printed sign, and it both dates your letter and cancels the stamp so nobody reuses it.
Speaker A: So the date on it is legally meaningful?
Speaker B: Absolutely, courts, tax offices and competition organisers regularly accept the postmark date as the moment you sent something.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The envelope carried a London postmark dated the third of June" — it tells us where and when it was posted. "Entries must be postmarked by Friday" — the sending date matters, not the arrival. "Collectors pay well for a rare postmark" — the mark itself has value to philatelists.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Do not confuse the postmark with the stamp, and never write it as two words or as post-mark; postmark is one solid word, and as a verb the past form is postmarked.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Cancellation is the technical cousin, franking mark is the near twin used for business mail, and date stamp is the everyday alternative — but postmark keeps its inky, old-fashioned charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "postmark" in AI prompts — useful for building document scanning tools and for validating submission deadlines in web forms.
Speaker A: How would that apply to a scanning tool?
Speaker B: Ask the model to extract the details from a scanned envelope.
Prompt: Write a Python function that takes OCR text from a scanned envelope and extracts the postmark city and date into a structured dictionary.
Speaker A: And for deadline checking in a form?
Speaker B: Have it write the validation rule plainly.
Prompt: Create a JavaScript validation function that accepts an entry only if the supplied postmark date is on or before the competition closing date.
Speaker A: Could it help with a database design?
Speaker B: Yes, ask for a schema that records posting evidence.
Prompt: Design a SQL table for tracking incoming correspondence with columns for sender, postmark date, postmark location and received date, including sensible indexes.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's get some friendly interface wording out of it.
Prompt: Write three short British English tooltip messages explaining to users that their application is judged by the postmark date rather than the delivery date.
Postmark — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary