Told

How to spell told

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce told

What does told mean?

1. verbCommunicated information, a story, or instructions to someone (past tense of tell).

Told in a sentence

• The manager told the team about the new schedule yesterday.

• She told me a long story about her trip to Spain.

Where does told come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of 'tell', which comes from the Old English verb tellan, meaning 'to relate, to count, or to reckon up'. That older sense of counting survives in the related noun 'tale' and in the word 'teller', which still names someone who counts money in a bank. The vowel change from 'tell' to 'told' is the result of an old Germanic pattern of forming the past tense by altering the root vowel rather than simply adding an ending, the same pattern that gives 'sell' its past form 'sold'. Because the underlying idea was 'to count things out one by one', the meaning drifted naturally toward 'recounting' a story or 'telling' information, since to recount is literally to count again. The single 'l' and the 'old' spelling can briefly trip a writer who expects a doubled letter from the base form 'tell', but the pattern matches 'sold' exactly.

How the word is built

• tell (Old English tellan: to relate, count)
• irregular past-tense vowel change to 'told'