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One of these days I'm going to write a dictionary about what words really mean. For example, the word "secret" means "something known to more than one person". My definition is better than the standard dictionary definition. 
If something is known to only 1 person, then it's not really important enough to actually have a word for it. It only start calling it a "secret" once the first person tells a second person, but under the condition that it not be told to a third.
A lot of words are like this, hidden meanings which everyone knows, but which dictionaries never capture.
Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I'm trying to write a discussion of public-key encryption, where a message encrypted with a public-key can only be decrypted with the matching private-key. The private-key is not a secret, but private.
In other words, under standard symmetric encryption, two people (sender and receiver) know the key. It's a secret. In asymmetric, public-key encryption, either everybody knows the public-key, or only a single person knows the private-key.
That only 1 party ever knows the private-key seems to be just as important as everybody knowing the public-key.
