Word.ws English Dictionary

secreting

/ˈsiːkɹətɪŋ/

secreting is the present participle and gerund of secret.

secreting is the present participle and gerund of secrete.

Meaning of secret

Verb

secret (third-person singular simple present secrets, present participle (US) secreting or (UK) secretting, simple past and past participle (US) secreted or (UK) secretted)

  1. (rare, transitive) To make or keep secret.
    • … she would unfold the silk, press it with a smooth wooden block that she'd heated in the oven, and then once more secret it away.1984, Peter Scott Lawrence, Around the mulberry tree, Firefly Books, p. 26
  2. (rare, transitive) To hide secretly.

See all 13 meanings of secret

Meaning of secrete

Verb (1)

secrete (third-person singular simple present secretes, present participle secreting, simple past and past participle secreted)

  1. (transitive, usually, glands) To extract a substance from blood, sap, or similar to produce and emit waste for excretion or for the fulfilling of a physiological function.
    • Why one set of cells should secrete bile, another urea, and so on, we do not know.1842, William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Human Physiology
    Synonyms:
    secern
  2. (figuratively, transitive) To exude or yield.
    • If you won’t believe my great new doctrine (which, by the bye, is as old as the Greeks), that souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells, you will remain in outer darkness.1863: Charles Kingsley (author), Frances Elizabeth Kingsley (editor), Charles Kingsley, his Letters and Memories of his Life (first published posthumously in 1877), page 156 (8th edition: 1880)

Verb (2)

secrete (third-person singular simple present secretes, present participle secreting, simple past and past participle secreted)

  1. (transitive) To conceal.
    • With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general pretence of being asleep.1859, Charles Dickens, chapter II, in A Tale of Two Cities, London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC

See all 4 meanings of secrete

Forms of secreting

alternative formsecretting

Origin of secreting

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Questions about secreting

What is secreting the present participle and gerund of?
Secreting is the present participle and gerund of secret.
How do you pronounce secreting?
Secreting is pronounced /ˈsiːkɹətɪŋ/ (UK).

Words near secreting in the dictionary

  1. secretest
  2. secreteth
  3. secretin
  4. secretine
  5. secretines
  6. secreting
  7. secretins
  8. secretion
  9. secretional
  10. secretionary
  11. secretions

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: secreting (page history and authors); secret (page history and authors); secrete (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-secreting (secret).wav.

Cite this entry: “secreting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/secreting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.