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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
secrecy
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a blanket of secrecy
▪ The trial was held under a blanket of secrecy.
an oath of secrecy
▪ Anyone who joined had to swear an oath of secrecy.
cloaked in secrecy/mystery
▪ The talks have been cloaked in secrecy.
pledged to secrecy
▪ Employees were pledged to secrecy.
shrouded in secrecy
▪ The work is shrouded in secrecy.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
absolute
▪ Secrecy Rule 2.1 stresses the need for absolute secrecy before an announcement is made.
▪ In the area of basic national defense the frequent need for absolute secrecy is, of course, self-evident.
▪ Until radicals grasped the need to conduct their affairs in absolute secrecy, their chances of conspiring effectively were remote.
great
▪ The first is the need for great secrecy.
▪ Hierarchy is perceived to operate very strongly and there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding ideas.
▪ And, with great secrecy, she bought a Christmas tree, and decorated it herself when Susan was asleep.
▪ This I did in what I thought were circumstances of great secrecy.
official
▪ Worse still, they are accused of invoking official secrecy to conceal the deception.
total
▪ Now these men were involved in a long-term operation and total secrecy was essential to its outcome.
▪ The negotiations were in total secrecy - not even his Cabinet were informed.
▪ It is organised into small cells and therefore hard to infiltrate, particularly as total secrecy is demanded of its members.
▪ An operation involving 100 officers from London and Kent was set up in total secrecy.
▪ We were anxious to preserve total secrecy on the new product to protect our legal rights.
▪ It was negotiated in almost total secrecy.
■ NOUN
bank
▪ Properties and bank accounts used for laundering guerrilla funds would be confiscated, with bank secrecy laws lifted in order to facilitate investigation.
▪ This is so despite falling tax rates in many industrialised countries and bank secrecy legislation designed to curtail their attractions.
law
▪ Properties and bank accounts used for laundering guerrilla funds would be confiscated, with bank secrecy laws lifted in order to facilitate investigation.
■ VERB
maintain
▪ They are content to maintain their secrecy and carry on business as normal.
▪ Washington was concerned about maintaining secrecy and preventing leaks.
▪ The news can not be suppressed despite the most stringent efforts to maintain secrecy.
surround
▪ The crisis of visibility concerns the notorious secrecy that surrounds prisons and what goes on inside them.
▪ Perhaps, no decision caused more trouble for the past council than the secrecy that surrounded the Amazon.com deal.
▪ Unprecedented secrecy and conflicting information surrounds the launch of the book.
▪ An indication of the secrecy surrounding Buckley is an episode that took place in September 1977.
▪ The secrecy that surrounded Emor had been a large part of its charm.
▪ Hierarchy is perceived to operate very strongly and there is a great deal of secrecy surrounding ideas.
▪ The secrecy which surrounded the location of a world under survey evaluation was essential in most instances.
▪ Since its beginnings in the mid-1950s, the secrecy surrounding Sugar Grove has been intense.
swear
▪ No, surely he would swear her to secrecy - if he really did agree in the end to Miguel's request.
▪ Amy told no one else except her younger brother Howard, and she swore him to secrecy.
▪ Ranulf was sworn to secrecy, but there was worse to come.
▪ She swore him to secrecy and asked him to build the barrel.
▪ Jett swore me to secrecy, with particular reference to you.
▪ Lois had sworn her to secrecy.
▪ John Thaw says he knows, but is sworn to secrecy.
▪ They swore one another to secrecy.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
be veiled in mystery/secrecy etc
swear sb to secrecy/silence
▪ Amy told no one else except her younger brother Howard, and she swore him to secrecy.
▪ He swore his family to secrecy and tried to continue living a normal life, making regular stage appearances and several movies.
▪ Jett swore me to secrecy, with particular reference to you.
▪ Lois had sworn her to secrecy.
▪ No, surely he would swear her to secrecy - if he really did agree in the end to Miguel's request.
▪ She swore him to secrecy and asked him to build the barrel.
▪ They swore one another to secrecy.
▪ This time I had taken the precaution of tipping off the organizers in advance and swearing them to silence.
veil of secrecy/deceit/silence etc
▪ He had apparently recovered from his visit to Johanna, hiding his feelings behind the usual veil of secrecy.
▪ Justice can not prevail under a veil of secrecy or behind doors that do not open.
▪ The client has thrown a veil of secrecy over the development, with contractors reluctant to discuss the project.
wall of silence/secrecy
▪ A wall of silence has now descended over the key players.
▪ Blount met with a convenient wall of silence.
▪ But the wall of silence that protected behind the scenes negotiations produced no answers.
▪ Only Jim Crane, ambitious but a little more human than the other hacks, can break Alice's wall of silence.
▪ Other cracks in the wall of secrecy have appeared in recent years, as we shall see in Chapter 5.
▪ Very soon a cold stone wall of silence had tormented them to wounded exasperation.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Anna swore me to secrecy on the subject of her family until her book came out.
▪ Our commanding officer emphasized the need to maintain the utmost secrecy about the operation at all times.
▪ The gunmen tracked down their target, despite the shroud of secrecy surrounding his whereabouts.
▪ There is a great deal of secrecy within the organization.
▪ Why all the secrecy? You've got nothing to be ashamed of.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A 10-year life span for classified information, unless an agency specifies that the information must have continued secrecy.
▪ In implementing his plan, Reagan operated in the utmost secrecy.
▪ It had what all lovers lovers, seek, secrecy, privacy, exclusivity.
▪ The decision to release the documents reverses a Red Cross policy of secrecy.
▪ The expansion of citizen participation is greatly threatened today by government secrecy, industrial monopolies, and a closed media.
▪ They were given uniforms; there was a rudimentary organisation; they practised drilling and, in secrecy, weapons training.
▪ You must make him understand the need for secrecy.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Secrecy

Secrecy \Se"cre*cy\, n.; pl. Secrecies. [From Secret.]

  1. The state or quality of being hidden; as, his movements were detected in spite of their secrecy.

    The Lady Anne, Whom the king hath in secrecy long married.
    --Shak.

  2. That which is concealed; a secret. [R.]
    --Shak.

  3. Seclusion; privacy; retirement. ``The pensive secrecy of desert cell.''
    --Milton.

  4. The quality of being secretive; fidelity to a secret; forbearance of disclosure or discovery.

    It is not with public as with private prayer; in this, rather secrecy is commanded than outward show.
    --Hooker.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
secrecy

1570s, from secretee, "quality of being secret" (early 15c.), from Old French secré, variant of secret (see secret (n.)) + -ty (2). Form altered on model of primacy, etc.

Wiktionary
secrecy

n. 1 concealment; the condition of being secret or hidden. 2 The habit of keeping secrets.

WordNet
secrecy
  1. n. the trait of keeping things secret [syn: secretiveness, silence]

  2. the condition of being concealed or hidden [syn: privacy, privateness, concealment]

Wikipedia
Secrecy

Secrecy (also called clandestinity or furtiveness) is the practice of hiding information from certain individuals or groups who do not have the "need to know", perhaps while sharing it with other individuals. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret.

Secrecy is often controversial, depending on the content or nature of the secret, the group or people keeping the secret, and the motivation for secrecy. Secrecy by government entities is often decried as excessive or in promotion of poor operation; excessive revelation of information on individuals can conflict with virtues of privacy and confidentiality. It is often contrasted with social transparency.

Secrecy (film)

Secrecy is a 2008 documentary film directed by Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. According to its website, it "is a film about the vast, invisible world of government secrecy," and features interviews with a variety of people on all sides of the secrecy issue, including Steven Aftergood (of Federation of American Scientists), Tom Blanton (of the National Security Archive), James B. Bruce (who was a senior staff member to the Iraq Intelligence Commission), Barton Gellman (a Washington Post journalist), Melissa Boyle Mahle (a former CIA officer), the plaintiffs in United States v. Reynolds (1953) (the case which established the State Secrets Privilege in the United States), Siegfried Hecker (former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory), Mike Levin (a former member of the National Security Agency), and Neal Katyal and Charles Swift (the lawyers for the defendant in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld).

It competed in the Documentary Competition at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and at the Berlin Film Festival, among many other venues.

The film was the winner of the Special Jury Award for Documentary Features at the Independent Film Festival, Boston, and was named Best Documentary at the Newport International Film Festival.

Secrecy (disambiguation)

Secrecy is the practice of sharing information among a group of people, which can be as small as one person, while hiding it from all others.

Secrecy may also refer to:

  • Secrecy (book), a 1998 novel by Belva Plain
  • Secrecy (film), a 2008 documentary film
Secrecy (book)

Secrecy is a 1998 novel and New York Times bestseller by Belva Plain. It tells the story of Charlotte, a little girl from the Dawes family whose adolescence life was shatterded after she was raped by Ted, her uncle's stepson.

Usage examples of "secrecy".

Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret.

While the secrecy afforded our valued clients remains paramount to the Swiss philosophy of banking, a decision has been made to voluntarily comply with the demands of our federal government, the wishes of our citizens, and the requests of the international authorities.

It concerns not the prevention of all experimentation upon animals, but rather the abolition of its cruelty, its secrecy, its abuse.

America raised, not in condemnation of all experimentation upon animals, but solely in protest against its cruelty and secrecy, and in appeal for its reform, was that of the leading American surgeon of his time, Professor Henry J.

The distinguished jurist undoubtedly believed that by these repeated interrogations he had reached a complete denial of the secrecy of experimentation so far as the witness was concerned.

What is the attitude of the author toward cruelty in animal experimentation, or to the secrecy of the laboratory?

We find it apparently implied--but without positive statement--that there is little or no secrecy in animal experimentation, and that anyone may find admittance to a laboratory at any time.

They were already dressed in the finery each had ordered made for the other, commissioned through Meath himself in secrecy.

Abandoning secrecy, the praus leaped forward under maximum rowing power, accompanied by the deep, terrifying boom of war gongs.

The woman looked at him with a strange expression, the expression of one who loves and respects, even reveres, the isolation and secrecy of another soul.

Gelta nation-state, who have taken measures to ensure their secrecy as well as that of the pulsar and the existence of beings from other worlds.

La Foresterie was then ordered to pass to Riom, where the sisters Quinet lived, and to bribe them heavily to secrecy.

The theme of our discourse was, commonly, too sacred for any ears but our own: Disclosures were of too intimate and delicate a nature, for any but a female audience: they were too injurious to the fame and peace of Ormond, for him to be admitted to partake of them: Yet his words implied a full acquaintance with recent events, and with purposes and deliberations, shrowded, as we imagined, in impenetrable secrecy.

His secrecy regarding the antitoxin they deemed quite justifiable, since its public diffusion in unperfected form could not but do more harm than good.

For again as in 1788 and 1796, Hamilton was throwing his weight into the contest to tip the balance against Adams, except this time there was no pretense of secrecy.