Other forms: secrets, secretly
A secret is something you know and are not supposed to pass on. A birthday present pushed to the back of a cupboard, a name whispered behind a hand, a door in the hall that nobody has ever mentioned.
Secret is also an adjective — a secret door, a secret admirer, the secret police — and the adverb does the same work: they married secretly in March. You keep a secret, you tell someone a secret, you let a friend in on one, and you do the thing in secret. An open secret is the one everybody knows and nobody says out loud. The secret of or the secret to means the thing that makes something work: the secret of good bread is time. Watch out for secretive, which is not the same word — it describes a person who hides things by habit, and it is never a compliment.
1nounnounSomething you know that you must not tell anyone else.~18%
“She had kept the secret for eleven years.”
synonyms: confidence
2adjectivesecretKept hidden from other people on purpose.~80%
“There is a secret door behind the bookcase.”
synonyms: hidden, private, confidential
3nounexplainsThe thing that explains why something works so well.~2%
“The secret of good bread is time, not flour.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 60 of them on a sense (80 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: hidden
Latin sēcrētus meant separated, set apart — the past participle of sēcernō, to sunder out, to put aside from the rest. A secret is not really a thing hidden in the dark, then. It is a thing lifted out of the pile and kept somewhere on its own.
Proto-Indo-European
*krey-
Latin
sēcrētum
Middle English
secret
English, today
secret
The noun is from Middle English secret, from Latin sēcrētum. a doublet of secretum. dēagolnes. The verb is from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA