Skip to main content
secretarial school

secretarial school

2 2.7
A school that teaches typing, filing, and other office skills
  • noun
  • /ˌsɛkrəˈtɛriəl skuːl/
  • Archaic
translation icon : escuela de secretariado
  • Many students enroll in secretarial school to gain training in typing and business communication.
  • went to secretarial school

Examples

  • My parents insisted I go to secretarial school, so as a dutiful daughter who obeyed her parents, off to secretarial school I went, constantly dreaming of what I was missing by not being allowed to join the Air Force.

    Blog text (5)
  • I was expected to make straight A's and go to secretarial school.

    Blog text (24)
  • Not only was she the first member of her family to graduate from high school, but she had gone on to secretarial school as well.

    Fiction book (1997)
  • In June 1966, I graduated from high school and went straight into secretarial school.

    Blog text (5)
  • They sent me to secretarial school and then I applied for a job at Consolidated.

  • A woman from a poor Irish family, she'd worked her way through secretarial school and had become an assistant director of admissions at Harvard, over an hour's commute away.

    Fiction book (1997)
  • After graduating from high school, she decided to attend secretarial school to learn essential office skills.

  • He completed a program at secretarial school that prepared him for a career as an executive assistant.

Synonyms

vocational school
vssecretarial school
5 3.0

A school where students learn practical skills for a specific job

focuses specifically on office clerical skills like typing shorthand filing
technical school
vssecretarial school
4 3.2

A school that teaches practical skills for jobs like car repair or computer work

teaches office clerical skills rather than mechanical or industrial ones

Surface Forms

Morphology

secretarial + school

The meaning is directly compositional: 'secretarial' (related to the work of a secretary) + 'school' (an educational institution) yields a school for secretarial training. This adjective+noun compound follows common, cross-linguistic patterns and should be understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.

Etymology

The name secretarial school comes from a simple idea: a school where people learned to be a secretary, practising typing, shorthand and filing. So today the phrase means 'a school that teaches secretarial skills'.