These words refer to the postponing of a duty or to the leisurely, aimless passing of time. Procrastinate and stall both emphasize the putting off of serious questions, but stall can suggest any sort of delay to gain time, whereas procrastinate suggests occupying oneself with other, often trivial, matters. Stall, furthermore, can indicate a brief pause, as before answering a question, while procrastinate , by contrast, indicates the protracted dragging out or delaying of something over a longer time.

• His hemming and hawing was only a ruse to stall the reporters before answering their biting questions; When faced with a deadline on a term paper, she lolls about on her bed, daydreams, goes to a theatre of does anything she can think of to procrastinate a little longer.

Stall can, however, refer to a longer delay, in which case it suggests greater ill will than procrastinate : legislation stalled in a series of committee meetings.

Dawdle may refer to a kind of procrastinating in which a given duty is pursued half-heartedly and phlegmatically rather than put off or put aside: She knew that if she dawdled over the dishes, her mother would take over in a fit of exasperation and do them herself. But the word may refer also to a leisurely passing of time, with no sense whatever of postponing a duty: In the hour between trains, the dawdled about in a bookshop near the station. Tarry means to hang behind or to stray off course; a deliberate act of procrastinating may be implied: Don’t tarry on your way home from school. But he word now more often applies to aimless or leisurely stops along a course: a couple who decided to tarry another week in the lovely seaside resort. Now the word can sometimes sound quaint or affected.

Loiter indicates standing about aimlessly or moving from place to place in a slow, rambling way: No loitering in these premises; a tourist who loitered about he town square, browsing through several of the shops. The word seldom suggests the delaying of a task, although legally it can refer to a misdemeanour and, hence, can suggest an improper or sinister motive. Lag can suggest something that lacks impetus or falls behind a desirable rate of progress: when interest in the civic-centre project began to lag ; a theory that man’s social consciousness has lagged behind his technological accomplishments. The word may be used in a more literal way, without the disapproval inherent in the previous examples: a fifteen-mile hike during which those with blistered feet began to lag behind the others.

Shilly-shally suggests an evasive tactic of stalling for time or an attempt to avoid taking a stand: He was not one to shilly-shally when he disagreed with the findings of his colleagues. Most simply, the word can indicate any weak, vacillating or procrastinating behaviour: They shilly-shallied about technicalities while the bushfire raged out of control. Dally can indicate the leisurely passage of time where no postponing of duty is implied: a holiday in which they could dally as long as they wished in any city they found to their liking. Dally can also add a special note of pleasurably relaxed and even amorous dawdling, influenced by a related use of the word: guests at the party who had dallied with the young woman. More disapprovingly and with no note of playfulness, the word can indicate an indecisive wasting of time: housewives who dally over the pre-packaged cuts of meat in self-service supermarkets. Dilly-dally , an alternate form, more readily suggests sheer procrastinating: he dilly-dallied over what film to see until it was too late to go to any of them.