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secern.

To separate or set apart (someone or something from other persons or things).

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/sɪˈsɜːn/Received-Pronunciation/sə-/Received-Pronunciation/səˈsɝn/General-American
  1. To separate or set apart (someone or something from other persons or things).

    archaic · literary · transitive
  2. To separate (something from other things) in the mind; to discriminate, to distinguish.

    broadly · literary · transitive
  3. Synonym of secrete (“to extract or separate (a substance) from the blood, etc., for excretion or for the fulfilling of a physiological function”).

    archaic · literary · transitive
  4. Of a person or thing: to become separated from others.

    intransitive · literary
  5. To secrete a substance.

    intransitive · literary · rare
Where this word comes from

PIE word *swé Learned borrowing from Latin sēcernere, the present active infinitive of sēcernō (“to put apart, divide, separate, sever, sunder; (figuratively) to disjoin, dissociate, part; to discern, distinguish; to exclude, pull aside, set aside, reject”), from sē- (prefix meaning ‘apart; aside; away’) + cernō (“to divide, separate; to distinguish, sift; to perceive, see; to comprehend, discern, regard, understand; to decide”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *krey- (“to divide, separate, sift”)). Senses 1.3 and 2.2 (“synonym of secrete”) derive from the use of the Latin word sēcernere to translate Ancient Greek ἀποκρίνειν (apokrínein), the active infinitive participle of ἀποκρίνω (apokrínō, “to set apart, separate; to choose; to reject on inquiry; to answer, reply”).

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.