Secretary

How to spell secretary

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce secretary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does secretary mean?

1. nounA person employed to handle correspondence, scheduling, and administrative tasks for an organisation or individual.
2. nounA senior government official who heads a department of state.

Secretary in a sentence

• The secretary booked the meeting room and sent out the agenda.

• The foreign secretary met with diplomats to discuss the new treaty.

• Please leave the signed forms with the department secretary by Friday.

• The defence secretary announced an increase in military spending.

Where does secretary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Late Latin secretarius, which named a confidant: someone entrusted with private or confidential matters. That noun was built on the Latin secretum, meaning 'a secret' or 'something set apart', which in turn came from the verb secernere, 'to separate or sift apart', formed from se- 'apart' and cernere 'to sift or distinguish'. English took the word in the late 1300s, by way of Medieval Latin and Old French, originally for a trusted person who handled a ruler's private correspondence. From that confidential clerk the meaning broadened to the office worker who manages letters and records, and rose in rank to the modern government minister, the Secretary of State. The buried 'secret' inside the spelling is the key memory hook: a secretary was literally the keeper of secrets, which explains the otherwise easily dropped middle syllable secret-AR-y.

How the word is built

• secret (from Latin secretum: a hidden or confidential thing)
• -ary (suffix forming a person connected with something)