tell

1. 1.

   a Swiss patriot who lived in the early 14th century and who was renowned for his skill as an archer; according to legend an Austrian governor compelled him to shoot an apple from his son's head with his crossbow (which he did successfully without mishap)

   SynonymsWilliam Tell

   Broaderarcher

Other forms of tell

plural

tells·

past tense or participle

told

present participle

telling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about tell

What does tell mean?

tell means "express in words". That is the primary sense; the word has 9 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in tell?

tell has 1 syllable: tell. In IPA it is /ˈtɛl/.

What is another word for tell?

Close synonyms include state, say, narrate, recount, recite. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is tell a common word?

tell is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with tell?

8 words rhyme with tell. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.