privacy
- 1The state of being secluded from the sight, presence, or knowledge of other people.
The high hedges around the garden give the family complete privacy.
Hotel guests expect a certain amount of privacy in their rooms.
Similarseclusion, solitude, isolation
Note
The core sense, built plainly from private plus the noun-forming -cy. It is often measured by what a space allows. Emerson Hough's The Purchase Price (1910) describes a steamboat deck too cramped for it, and a 1944 Railway Magazine piece describes a Pullman sleeper that offered no more of it than curtains along an aisle. Here it takes no plural. The plural privacies belongs to the old 'secluded place' and 'a private matter'.
- 2
- 3The condition of being protected from surveillance, public scrutiny, harmful publicity, and the release of personal information, typically by governments or private organizations.
Privacy advocates challenged the agency's mass collection of phone records.
Strong encryption helps protect users' privacy from corporate surveillance.
Similarconfidentiality, anonymity, secrecy
Note
Here privacy is claimed against institutions rather than against intrusive individuals, and it is usually argued in the language of rights. Many people take it to be among the common-law rights. That framing explains its typical company: privacy is something to be protected, violated or defended. In this sense it is a public and political word as much as a personal one.
- 4The state of keeping something secret; secrecy.
Note
An obsolete overlap with secrecy, where the stress fell on keeping things hidden rather than on being unseen. By 1910 the two had parted. Emerson Hough could rule out "secrecy or privacy" as two distinct things. When an older text speaks of plans or negotiations carried on with privacy, secrecy is the likely meaning.
- 5A place where one can be secluded from others.
Note
A countable use the language has given up. A privacy was once a place, and a garden could hold several privacies. Modern readers meet it only in older writing. In current English the word would be heard as the state of seclusion instead, so a secluded spot needs another noun.
- 6A personal or private matter, one that concerns only oneself.
The letter dealt with certain privacies the family never spoke of openly.
She guarded that small privacy as something no friend had a right to know.
Similarsecret
Note
A countable private affair, close in meaning to a secret. Dryden, in his 1680 preface to Ovid's Epistles, suggests Ovid may have stumbled "upon the privacies of Livia" and goes on to picture her in a bath. The word hovers between hidden knowledge and intimate life. The use is obsolete, and modern English keeps privacy uncountable outside such older texts.
- 7A legal relationship between parties arising from their mutual interest or participation in a transaction or contract.
Note
A lawyer's term that lost out to its near twin, privity, which carries this meaning without ambiguity. In older legal writing, privacy between parties means their shared stake in a contract or transaction, not freedom from scrutiny. The trap for a modern reader is to hear the everyday sense in a passage about who was party to an agreement.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "private" combined with the suffix "-cy".