Tell

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: [tʰɔː]

Definitions

1. To communicate information or facts to someone through speech or writing
2. To express information or a story to another through spoken or written words
3. To convey information or knowledge to another person by speaking or writing ; to disclose a secret, fact, or hidden detail ; to demonstrate or indicate something clearly based on evidence or observation

Etymology: The most surprising thing about "tell" is that its oldest sense was arithmetic. Old English "tellan" meant "to count, enumerate," and that counting sense is still visible in the word's relatives: Dutch "tellen" and German "zählen" both mean "to count," and "teller" survives in English for a bank employee who counts money. Telling a story and counting beads on a string were, at root, the same act of recounting items in order. The word's ancestry reaches back to a Proto-Indo-European root linked to calculation, and through Proto-Germanic forms meaning "number" or "counting" it arrived in Old English with that sense intact. Over the centuries, the idea of enumerating items gradually widened into reporting them, so that to count out the facts became to relate them to someone else. The Dutch "vertellen" and West Frisian "fertelle" preserve this shift in their prefixed forms, which mean "to tell" or "to narrate."

Synonyms: inform, notify, reveal, communicate, disclose

Antonyms: conceal, withhold, suppress