Other forms: told, tells, telling
Tell is what you do when you put information into words for somebody else. You tell her your name, tell him the time, tell the children a story before bed.
Tell wants a person after it: you tell SOMEONE something, but you say something TO someone. 'He said me' and 'he told to me' are the two mistakes to watch for. It also means to order, as when the doctor tells you to rest, and to see a difference: 'I can't tell them apart', 'can you tell butter from margarine?'. On top of that it means to know from small signs, as in 'I can tell when she is lying'. In poker, a tell is the tiny habit that gives your hand away. The past form is irregular: tell, told, told.
1verbtellTo give someone information in words.~60%
“Tell me what happened, right from the beginning.”
synonyms: inform, let know
2verborderTo order or instruct someone to do something.~12%
“The nurse tells him to sit still and stop talking.”
3verbseeTo see or hear the difference between two things.~24%
“I can never tell my two cousins apart.”
4verbknowTo know something from small signs, without being informed.~2%
“You can tell from her face that the news is bad.”
5nounhabitA small habit that gives away what someone is hiding, especially at cards.~2%
“His tell is a quick glance at his chips.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 12 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (4 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Tell began as counting. Old English tellan and Middle English tellen meant to count as much as to say, from Proto-Germanic *taljana, 'to count, enumerate', built on *talo, 'number'. German still uses zaehlen for counting, and English keeps the old sense in a bank teller counting money and in the phrase 'all told'. Tale is its close cousin.
Proto-Germanic
*taljaną
Proto-West Germanic
*talljan
Old English
tellan — to count, tell
Middle English
tellen — to count, tell
English, today
tell
Built from
From Middle English tellen (“to count, tell”), from Old English tellan (“to count, tell”), from Proto-West Germanic talljan, from Proto-Germanic taljaną, talzijaną (“to count, enumerate”), from Proto-Germanic talą, talō (“number, counting”), from Proto-Indo-European dol- (“calculation, fraud”). Cognate with stq tälle (“to say; tell”), West Frisian telle (“to count”), West Frisian fertelle (“to tell, narrate”), Dutch tellen (“to count”) and Dutch vertellen (“to tell”), Low German tellen (“to count”), German zählen, Faroese telja, Swedish tala (“to speak”). More at tale.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA