Excrete or secrete?
excrete is a verb meaning “To discharge material (including waste products) from a cell, body or system”; secrete is a verb meaning “To extract a substance from blood, sap, or similar to produce and emit waste…”. In written English (wordfreq, 2021 data) secrete is about 2.6 times as common as excrete.
What is the difference between excrete and secrete?
| excrete | secrete | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | verb | adjective, verb |
| Meaning | To discharge material (including waste products) from a cell, body or system | To extract a substance from blood, sap, or similar to produce and emit waste for excretion or for the fulfilling of a physiological function To exude or yield To conceal |
| Example | Your open pores excrete sweat and dirt | […] they ſuppoſing Two other Divine Hypoſtaſes Superiour thereunto, which were perfectly Secrete from Matter. […] This ſo containeth all… |
| Forms | excretes, excreting, excreted | secretes, secreting, secreted |
| Pronunciation | /ɛkˈskɹiːt/ /ɪkˈskɹiːt/ | /sɪˈkɹiːt/ /səˈkɹiːt/ |
| In writing | about once in every 5 million words | about once in every 2 million words |
Sources: excrete and secrete in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of excrete and secrete
excrete
- 1
To discharge material (including waste products) from a cell, body or system
Your open pores excrete sweat and dirt
secrete
- 1
To extract a substance from blood, sap, or similar to produce and emit waste for excretion or for the fulfilling of a physiological function
- 2
To conceal
- 3
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
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, excrete or secrete?
excrete appears about once in every 5 million words; secrete about once in every 2 million words.
excrete about once in every 5 million wordssecrete about once in every 2 million words
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search excrete vs secrete?
“excrete vs secrete” is searched about 20 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.