Tales

How to spell tales

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tales

What does tales mean?

1. nounStories or narrative accounts, especially imaginative or entertaining ones.

Tales in a sentence

• The old sailor shared tales of his long voyages at sea.

• Children gathered for bedtime tales about dragons and knights.

Where does tales come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'tale', which descends directly from the Old English 'talu', a native word meaning 'speech', 'a telling', or 'an account'. It belongs to a wide Germanic family: the related forms include Dutch 'taal' (language) and German 'Zahl' (number) and 'erzählen' (to tell), which shows that the early sense fused the ideas of counting up and recounting events. That older numerical thread survives in the English verb 'tell', which once meant 'to count' as well as 'to narrate', and in 'teller' for someone who counts money in a bank. Over the medieval period the meaning narrowed from any account toward the modern sense of a story, especially an entertaining or fictional one. Because 'tales' sounds exactly like 'tails', the spelling trap is to remember that the storytelling word keeps the 'tale' (with an 'a-l-e') seen in 'fairy tale' and 'tell'.

How the word is built

• tale (story, account)
• -s (plural)

Words that sound like tales

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• tails: The rear appendages of animals, or things resembling them in shape or position.