Tell

How to spell tell

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tell

What does tell mean?

1. verbTo communicate information to someone in spoken or written words.
2. nounA small unconscious action or habit that reveals what someone is really thinking or feeling.

Tell in a sentence

• verb

  Please tell the manager that the delivery has arrived.

• noun

  The poker player's nervous blink was a clear tell that he was bluffing.

• verb

  The report did not tell us anything we did not already know.

• noun

  Experienced interviewers learn to read every nervous tell a candidate gives.

Where does tell come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that comes from the Old English verb tellan, which meant 'to reckon, to count, or to relate in order'. The original sense was numerical: to tell was to count things out one by one, a meaning that still survives in expressions like a bank teller (someone who counts money) and the phrase 'all told'. From counting items the sense broadened to recounting events, and so by the medieval period 'tell' had settled into its modern meaning of relating or informing. It belongs to the same Germanic family as the Dutch tellen and the German zahlen, both connected to counting, and to the noun 'tale', which was once simply the things counted or recounted. The spelling has stayed mercifully simple, with the doubled final l a normal English signal that the preceding vowel is short.

How the word is built

• tell (from Old English tellan: to reckon, count, relate)