Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

surreptitious

UK/ˌsʌɹɪpˈtɪʃəs/US/səˌɹɛpˈtɪʃəs/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,584 of 15,258leans writtenformal · an editor’s judgement

Surreptitious means done secretly so as not to be seen. A glance at a watch, a phone checked under a table.

The word is nearly always about small acts rather than large crimes, which is why a surreptitious look and a surreptitious sip are the natural uses. Nobody surreptitiously robs a bank. That smallness makes it faintly comic. The adverb surreptitiously is commoner than the adjective. Its neighbours are furtive, which suggests guilt, and covert, which is official and belongs to intelligence work.

Definitions of surreptitious

  1. 1adjectivesurreptitiousDone quietly and secretly to avoid being noticed.C2

    “He took a surreptitious look at his phone.”

Where it comes from

Surreptitious creeps. Latin surrēpō meant to creep along, and surrēptīcius meant furtive or clandestine, so the word describes a way of moving rather than a motive.

  1. Latin

    surrēptīcius — furtive, clandestine

  2. English, today

    surreptitious

Built from

  • surrēpō · Latin — to creep along

Borrowed from Latin surrēptīcius (“furtive, clandestine”), from surrēpō (“to creep along”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 10 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

surreptitious in the wild

  • In this episode, Buffy follows Angel back to Los Angeles, where she confronts him about his surreptitious assistance back in Sunnydale.

    I Will Remember You (Angel)

  • The standards describe padlocks and explain cycle tests, operational tests, environmental tests, forcing tests, and surreptitious entry tests.

    ASTM F883

  • For example, Samuel Goodenough wrote "How shocked was I to see Salisbury's surreptitious anticipation of Brown's paper on new Holland plants, under the name and disguise of Mr.

    On the cultivation of the plants belonging to the natural order of Proteeae

  • After initially being exposed as a surreptitious funding front for the African National Congress (ANC) it was subsequently acknowledged as an in-house investment firm for the party.

    Chancellor House (company)

  • Catch and kill is a surreptitious technique employed by newspapers and media outlets to prevent an individual from publicly revealing information damaging to a third party.

    Catch and kill

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.