Meaning and Definition of a Secretary

The word 'secretary' comes from the Latin secretarius, itself rooted in secretum — a secret or a confidence. Historically, a secretary was a trusted person to whom private and confidential matters were entrusted, and that root meaning still shapes the role today: trustworthiness and confidentiality remain the very first qualities expected of anyone holding the title.

In everyday usage the term now covers an enormous range of positions — from a small trader's personal assistant, to the office-bearer who runs a housing society's day-to-day affairs, to the senior compliance professional who signs statutory returns on behalf of a listed company. What ties all of these together is not the size of the organisation but the nature of the work: a secretary is the person who manages an organisation's correspondence, records, meetings and communication on behalf of the individual, committee, or Board that appoints them, and who is trusted with information that is not open to the general membership or the public.

For the Gujarat board Std 11 Secretarial Practice syllabus, a secretary may be defined as a person appointed by an individual, an association, an institution, a co-operative body, a government department, or a company, to conduct its correspondence, maintain its records, organise its meetings, and carry out such administrative and, where applicable, statutory duties as are assigned, acting always within the authority given and in the interests of the appointing body.

Three elements run through every definition of the word:

• Appointment — a secretary always holds office because someone (an individual employer, a managing committee, a Board of Directors) has appointed them; the office does not exist independently.
• Agency and trust — a secretary acts for the appointing authority, not on personal account, and is entrusted with confidential and often financial information.
• Administrative-cum-communicative function — correspondence, record-keeping and meeting management form the common core of the work, whatever the setting.

A secretary is therefore best understood not as a single job but as a family of offices that share a common function — administering the affairs of a body on its behalf — while differing sharply in scope, authority and legal responsibility depending on which body is being served. This distinction is exactly what the next section on types of secretary develops.