Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Postscript for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's word is "Postscript" — noun, pronounced /ˈpəʊstskrɪpt/, with the stress on "post".
Narrator: A postscript is a short passage added at the end of a letter, message or book, after the main body has been finished.
Narrator: In plain English, it is the extra thought you tack on once you have already signed off.
Narrator: It comes from the Latin postscriptum, meaning written afterwards, from post, after, and scribere, to write, which is why the abbreviation P.S. is still used today.
Narrator: A common collocation is "add a postscript", which describes slipping in one last remark at the foot of a letter or an email.
Narrator: It differs from an appendix, because an appendix is planned supporting material, while a postscript is an afterthought written once the piece was thought to be complete.
Narrator: Figuratively, people speak of "a sad postscript to the affair", meaning a final event that follows the main story and quietly colours it.
Narrator: Publishing, journalism, law, history writing and software documentation all rely on the word, and printing even borrowed it for a page description language.
Narrator: So remember: a postscript is the thought that arrives after the full stop, and still earns its place.
Speaker A: Why do people still write P.S. at the bottom of an email, when they could simply edit the message?
Speaker B: Because it feels human! POSTSCRIPT comes from the Latin postscriptum, written afterwards, and it survived from the days of ink, when you could not go back and rewrite a finished page.
Speaker A: So the charm is that it admits the writer changed their mind?
Speaker B: Exactly that, and marketers noticed long ago that readers' eyes fall on the postscript almost before the letter itself.
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "She added a postscript asking after his mother" — a warm afterthought. "The final chapter reads like a postscript to the war" — a closing echo of a bigger story. "He signed the contract, with a postscript noting the delivery date" — a small but binding addition.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: Postscript is one word with no hyphen and no space, and the plural is postscripts, not postscripta, so keep it simple and keep the s at the end.
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: Afterword is the bookish cousin, addendum is the formal twin, and coda is the elegant alternative from music, though postscript keeps its friendly, ink-stained charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "postscript" in AI prompts — useful for email drafting tools and for release notes in documentation pipelines.
Speaker A: How does it apply to an email tool?
Speaker B: Ask the model to generate the closing line separately from the body.
Prompt: Draft a polite client follow-up email and end it with a one-sentence postscript that restates the deadline without sounding pushy.
Speaker A: And for documentation?
Speaker B: Use it to capture late-breaking changes that arrived after the notes were written.
Prompt: Write release notes for version two point four and append a postscript listing any hotfixes merged after the release branch was cut.
Speaker A: Could it help with code review?
Speaker B: Yes, as a short closing remark on a pull request summary.
Prompt: Summarise this pull request in five bullet points and add a postscript flagging one risk the reviewer should check before merging.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: Let's apply it to incident reporting, where the aftermath often matters most.
Prompt: Produce a post-incident report for this outage and close with a postscript describing what changed in monitoring a week later.
Postscript — meaning in Arabic & definition More P courses GL Dictionary