Let someone in on/to a secret (2025)

Hello,

Let someone in on/to a secret

Although dictionaries suggest that the right preposition is ON, I've found numerous examples with TO as well.
Is TO acceptable? Wrong? Informal?

Thanks

I'm not sure whether 'into' is a perfectly normal alternative, or a rare one I'd accept but wouldn't say myself. Perhaps it's old-fashioned? "Let * into the secret" on Google Books brings up many examples, but prominent writers among them include Fanny Burney, Emerson, Sterne, Fenimore Cooper, Wilkie Collins - the first modern writer I can see using it is Eric Ambler, and that's 1940.

Yep, that's it all right: "let * in on the secret" is all contemporary. So 'into' sounds basically fine to me because I'm used to older writers, but it's apparently not the current idiom.

Driven said:

I have never heard anybody say, "let somebody in to (or into) a secret". If somebody said that I would say, "The secret what?" Because it sounds like it should be "let somebody in to the secret chamber" or "the secret room", or "the secret club". Letting somebody "in on a secret" is a common expression.

Click to expand...

I agree with you, but look at this for example:
http://fabfreelancewriting.com/copywriter/copywriter_tips.html

I'll let you in to a secret. The top earners in writing are copywriters. That is, commercial writers – they write for businesses. (Writing for business is known as copywriting.)

ewie said:

It's always been in on for me, Paul

Click to expand...

Same for me, but the hits for "let me in to a secret" are so many that it's hard to believe it's plain wrong.
This is from a UK site for example
http://www.bobpiper.co.uk/2009/07/defying_the_edgbaston_drinks_b.php

So, I'm going to let you in to a secret... but please keep it to yourselves. It is Councillor Bob Piper's foolproof method of smuggling a decent drink in to the Edgbaston Test match.

Confining ourselves to UK sites, 'into' is much more common than 'in on', and the numbers seem to be robust. The British National Corpus has six relevant hits for "into the secret", four for "in on the secret" - suggestive but too small to make much of. So perhaps the date split in Google Books is actually BE/AE, where AE has innovated since the nineteenth century, and if we could confine it to BE books we'd see 'into' still in common use.

Adding "colour" into the search makes 'into' much more common, but they're mostly old texts again. So it looks to me like AE has changed to 'in on', and it's spreading into BE.

Thank you all for your help.
IN ON seems to be correct for both AE and BE English, whereas INTO is kind of OK only to BE speakers..
The Oxford dictionary actually lists them both:

let sb in on sth|
let sb into sth (informal) to allow sb to share a secret

Click to expand...

entangledbank said:

Adding "colour" into the search makes 'into' much more common

Click to expand...

Erm ....... what?
Sorry, Entang, I haven't a clue what you mean there ...

Errrrrrm ... righto, o wise one ... but ... how do you get colo(u)r into a search for let ... into a secret?

(Am I being extraordinarily dense here?)

cuchuflete said:

He used a BE spelling to force the search to return only BE (or very likely BE) usages.
AE would use color. Noah Webster told us to dispense with all that Frenchified spelling you English folk so adore. We, being a contrary bunch, sometimes do and sometimes don't.

Click to expand...

I'm risking drifting off topic - but I'll let you in to a secret - I was under the impression that google and the like were clever enough to search for "colour" and "color" no matter which you wrote.

Here's another place where Google is trying its damnedest to give us what it guesses is helpful, even if we're stupid and spelt it wrong. Too bad if we're intelligent and trying to defeat Google's second-guessing. What I did was add the string "+colour" to my searches. It restricts the hits to those that contain the word "colour", but in Google Books you're looking at entire books, so it's a reasonable gamble that the word will appear somewhere in it.

Routine Google search conflates every equivalence they know about: "colour" and "color" and who knows what else. So the plus sign is needed: supposedly, "+colour" finds that exact spelling, and will therefore distinguish BE from AE. In practice it's hand-to-hand combat down the spiral staircase trying to get anything linguistically useful out of the f***ers.