DCHP-2

secondary school The information concerning secondary school concerns primarily the written language, and not the spoken language unless of a very formal, official kind. With this lexeme, the written/spoken split is extreme in Canada. DCHP-2 (July 2016)

• n. — Education, especially British Columbia

  a school offering courses following primary school ; a high school.

  Type: 5. Frequency — Secondary school begins in different grades in different provinces and territories, but ends in grade 12 everywhere except Quebec, where grade 11 is the last grade. Grade 12 is the first year of CEGEP, a post-secondary institution unique to Quebec.
  As Charts 1 and 2 show for the written language, the term secondary school is most prevalent in Canada. It competes most often with the variant high school, which is used most frequently in the United States (see Chart 2). The term high school is an official designation in the US, which is not the case in Canada--except for Ontario (see TDSB home page). However, in the spoken language in Canada, high school is frequently used to refer to secondary schools. Secondary school as a variant seems to have been come into widespread use in the 1960s (see the 1962 quotation). In Ontario, it was used in the nineteenth century as an umbrella term for any educational institution following elementary school, such as a collegiate, academy or high school (Kiddle & Schem 1877: 667).
  The term has so far not been marked Canadian by any Canadian dictionary.

  See also: high school  post-secondary  

  • See the 2015 quotation for an example of the mixed use of high school and secondary school from an official school website.