secretary general vs general secretary (2025)

Hello everyone,
Can someone explain to me why we say
Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
but
The General Secretary of the Labour Party?

What accounts for the word order of these two?
Thanks in advance.

Generally speaking (or speaking generally) it's the whim of the organization that establishes the name of the job or the title.

If you look up both terms in Wikipedia, you will see a substantial discussion.

Yours truly (or truly yours)

Speaking generally, these are conflicting word orders of both mothers (or fathers) of the English language, the Romance and the Germanic branch of languages. Generally speaking, in Germanic it would General Secretary [and in German this is indeed the case, even for the UN Secretary General], while with Romanic languages Secretery General usually would be preferred.

However in this case, it seems that, generally, Secretary General is preferred rather than General Secretary for most of the prestigious organisations: probably because in English most of the times there is more 'status' attributet to words going back to Romanic roots.
(Check out the terms for food for that - as long as it's running around on two or four feet the Germanic term is applied, but as soon as it is served it changes its name to the Romanic root.)

I haven't read the Wiki discussions.

But the connotations, for me, are:

Secretary General: international organisation; important personage

General Secretary: national organisation especially Trade Union; down-to-earth.

Loob said:

General Secretary: national organisation especially Trade Union; down-to-earth.

Click to expand...

Note that Nikita Khruschev and Mikhail Gorbachev held the post of general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

(I'm not sure what that illustrates as anything other than somebody whose title was "general secretary.")