Word.ws English Dictionary

state secret

state secret noun: information which pertains to the affairs of a country, access to which is restricted by the government.

Noun (1)

state secret (plural state secrets)

  1. Information which pertains to the affairs of a country, access to which is restricted by the government.
    • I'll tell you one great State secret: the Queen, sensible how much she was governed by the late Ministry, runs a little into t'other extreme, and is jealous in that point.1711, The Journal to Stella, Jonathan Swift, ch. 2: Letter 16
    • [T]here are another set of rascals prowling about the docks, chiefly at dusk, who make strange motions to you, and beckon you to one side, as if they had some state secret to disclose, intimately connected with the weal of the commonwealth.1849, Herman Melville, chapter 40, in Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC
  2. (broadly, humorous) Personal information which someone would like to keep private, even if ultimately not important.

Noun (2) capitalized: State secret

State secret (plural State secrets)

  1. (alternative) Alternative form of state secret.

state secret meaning in Arabic

state secret in Arabic

restricted information of national importance
سِرّ دَوْلَة sirr dawla

Examples of state secret in a sentence

  • "Your brother," he continued, "in his travels on the Continent stumbled by chance upon a State secret of international importance."1905, E. Phillips Oppenheim, chapter 5, in A Maker of History:
  • Zimbabwean prosecutors have charged four men including top figures from President Robert Mugabe's party with selling state secrets to foreign agents.2005 January 1, Stella Mapenzauswa, “Four face spy charges as Zimbabwe powerplay heats up”, in Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, retrieved...

Forms of state secret

pluralstate secrets
alternative formState secret
pluralState secrets

Questions about state secret

What does state secret mean?
State secret means information which pertains to the affairs of a country, access to which is restricted by the government.
What is state secret in Arabic?
State secret in Arabic is سِرّ دَوْلَة (sirr dawla). See State secret meaning in Arabic.
How do you use state secret in a sentence?
"Your brother," he continued, "in his travels on the Continent stumbled by chance upon a State secret of international importance."
What part of speech is state secret?
State secret is a noun.
What is the plural of state secret?
The plural of state secret is state secrets.

Words near state secret in the dictionary

  1. state polices
  2. state religion
  3. state religions
  4. state school
  5. state schools
  6. state secret
  7. state secrets
  8. state socialism
  9. state socialisms
  10. state socialist
  11. state socialists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: state secret (page history and authors); State secret (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)-Flame, not lame-state secret.wav.

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