Secretion

How to spell secretion

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce secretion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does secretion mean?

1. nounA substance produced and released by a gland or cell in the body, or the process of producing it.

Secretion in a sentence

• The doctor explained that excess secretion from the gland was causing the swelling.

• Saliva is a secretion that helps break down food in the mouth.

Where does secretion come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb secernere, meaning 'to set apart' or 'to sift out', which combined se- 'apart' with cernere 'to separate or distinguish'. The Latin noun secretio described the act of separating, and the same root sits behind the everyday word 'secret', literally something set apart and kept hidden. English took 'secretion' in the 1600s, at first in the general sense of separating, but anatomists and physiologists soon narrowed it to the way a gland separates out and releases a substance from the blood. The modern biological meaning, the fluid a gland produces, grew directly from that idea of a body sifting one thing apart from another. The single c in the middle is the spelling trap, since the cret root never doubles, and the ending is -tion rather than -sion because it follows the t-bearing Latin stem.

How the word is built

• se- (apart)
• cret (from cernere/secernere: to separate, sift)
• -ion (noun of action)