A wise 18th century British earl, Lord Chesterfield, wrote a letter to his son in which he advised, "No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination; never put off till tomorrow what you can do today." We won't put off telling you the answer to our question. The Latin word "cras," the great grandparent of "procrastinate," means "tomorrow." It took a while, but eventually "cras" gave rise to "procrastinatus," another Latin word that also basically means "to put off." By the late 1500s, people had gotten around to adopting that term into English as "procrastinate."