Secretaries

How to spell secretaries

11 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce secretaries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does secretaries mean?

1. nounMore than one person employed to handle correspondence, scheduling, and administrative tasks in an office.
2. nounSenior officials who head a government department or run the affairs of an organisation.

Secretaries in a sentence

• The two secretaries shared a desk near the front entrance.

• The cabinet secretaries gathered to vote on the budget.

• All the department secretaries met to discuss the new filing system.

• Both club secretaries signed the annual financial report.

Where does secretaries come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin secretarius, meaning a person entrusted with secrets or confidential matters. That noun was built on secretum, 'something hidden or set apart', which itself came from the verb secernere, 'to separate or sift out', formed from se- 'apart' and cernere 'to sift or distinguish'. In medieval use a secretary was literally a trusted confidant who handled private correspondence, and only later did the meaning broaden to the modern office role of someone who manages letters, records, and administration. English took the word in during the late 1300s, partly through Old French secretaire. The buried link to 'secret' is a handy memory aid: a secretary once kept secrets, which explains the secret- you can hear inside the spelling. The plural simply changes the -y of secretary to -ies, the regular English rule.

How the word is built

• secret (from Latin secretum: something hidden)
• -ary (one connected with)
• -es (plural)