Telling  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Doré's caricature of Münchhausen, a portrait bust of Baron Münchhausen, a typical unreliable narrator

This page Telling is part of the linguistics series.
Illustration: a close-up of a mouth in the film The Big Swallow (1901)

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To tell is to count, reckon, or enumerate; to narrate; to instruct or inform; to order; to direct, to say to someone; to discern, notice, identify or distinguish; to be revealed.

Etymology

From Middle English tellen (“to count, tell”), from Old English tellan (“to count, tell”), from Proto-Germanic *taljaną, *talzijaną (“to count, enumerate”), from Proto-Germanic *talą, *talǭ (“number, counting”), from Proto-Indo-European *dol- (“calculation, fraud”). Cognate with English tally (“to count”), West Frisian telle (“to count”), West Frisian fertelle (“to tell, narrate”), Dutch tellen (“to count”), Low German tellen (“to count”) and förtellen (“to tell, narrate”), Old High German zellen (German zählen, “to count”), German erzählen (“to tell, recount”), Old Norse telja (Faroese telja, “to count, tell”). More at tale.

See also

• Foretell