different between bestow vs tell

English

Etymology

From Middle English bestowen, bistowen; equivalent to be- (“on, over, about”) +? stow (“to put something away”).

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /b??sto?/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /b??st??/
• Rhymes: -??
• Hyphenation: be?stow

Verb

bestow (third-person singular simple present bestows, present participle bestowing, simple past and past participle bestowed)

1. (transitive) To lay up in store; deposit for safe keeping; to stow or place; to put something somewhere.
   • 1611, King James Bible, Luke 12:17:

     And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits.

   • 1977, J.R.R. Tolkien, Of the Rings of Power, HarperCollins, page 358:

     Of the Three Rings that the Elves had preserved unsullied no open word was ever spoken among the Wise, and few even of the Eldar knew where they were bestowed.

2. (transitive) To lodge, or find quarters for; provide with accommodation.
3. (transitive) To dispose of.
   • 1615-17, Thomas Middleton et al., The Widow, in The Ancient British drama, edited by Robert Dodsley, Sir Walter Scott, published 1810:

     Here are blank warrants of all dispositions; give me but the name and nature of your malefactor, and I'll bestow him according to his merits.
4. (transitive) To give; confer; impart gratuitously; present something to someone or something, especially as a gift or honour.

   Medals were bestowed on the winning team.

   • 1831, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

     Soft tears again bedewed my cheeks, and I even raised my humid eyes with thankfulness towards the blessed sun which bestowed such joy upon me.

   • 2008, Illiad, Userfriendly.org, “The Large Hadron Collider Game”

     CERN bestows slush fund on the LHC. Take all pennies from the CERN space.

5. (transitive) To give in marriage.
   • 1590-92, William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act 1, Scene 1, lines 50-51:

     That is not to bestow my youngest daughter/ before I have a husband for the elder.
6. (transitive) To apply; make use of; use; employ.
   • 1887, John Marston, Arthur Henry Bullen, The Works of John Marston:

     [...] I determine to bestow Some time in learning languages abroad; [...]

7. (transitive, obsolete) To behave or deport.

Derived terms

• bestowable
• bestowage
• bestowal
• bestower
• bestowment

Translations

Anagrams

• betows, bowest

English

Pronunciation

• (UK, US) enPR: t?l, IPA^(key): /t?l/, /t??/
• Rhymes: -?l

Etymology 1

From Middle English tellen (“to count, tell”), from Old English tellan (“to count, tell”), from Proto-Germanic *taljan?, *talzijan? (“to count, enumerate”), from Proto-Germanic *tal?, *tal? (“number, counting”), from Proto-Indo-European *dol- (“calculation, fraud”). Cognate with Saterland Frisian tälle (“to say; tell”), West Frisian telle (“to count”), West Frisian fertelle (“to tell, narrate”), Dutch tellen (“to count”), Low German tellen (“to count”), German zählen, Faroese telja. More at tale.

Verb

tell (third-person singular simple present tells, present participle telling, simple past and past participle told)

1. (transitive, archaic outside of idioms) To count, reckon, or enumerate.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.vii:

     And in his lap a masse of coyne he told, / And turned vpsidowne, to feede his eye / A couetous desire with his huge threasury.

   • 1875, Hugh MacMillan, The Sunday Magazine:

     Only He who made them can tell the number of the stars, and mark the place of each in the order of the one great dominant spiral.

2. (transitive) To narrate.
   • 2016, VOA Learning English (public domain)

     Tell her you’re here.

3. (transitive) To convey by speech; to say.
4. (transitive) To instruct or inform.
   • 1611, Bible (King James Version), Genesis xii. 18

     Why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife?
5. (transitive) To order; to direct, to say to someone.
   • 1909, H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica

     She said she hoped she had not distressed him by the course she had felt obliged to take, and he told her not to be a fool.

   • Stability was restored, but once the re-entry propulsion was activated, the crew was told to prepare to come home before the end of their only day in orbit.

6. (intransitive) To discern, notice, identify or distinguish.

   • Captain Edward Carlisle, soldier as he was, martinet as he was, felt a curious sensation of helplessness seize upon him as he met her steady gaze, her alluring smile; he could not tell what this prisoner might do.

7. (transitive) To reveal.

8. (intransitive) To be revealed.
   • 1990, Stephen Coonts, Under Siege, 1991 Pocket Books edition, ?ISBN, p.409:

     Cherry looks old, Mergenthaler told himself. His age is telling. Querulous — that's the word. He's become a whining, querulous old man absorbed with trivialities.

9. (intransitive) To have an effect, especially a noticeable one; to be apparent, to be demonstrated.
   • 1859 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

     Opinion ought [… to give] merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold […] keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favour.
10. (transitive) To use (beads or similar objects) as an aid to prayer.
11. (intransitive, childish) To inform someone in authority about a wrongdoing.

    I saw you steal those sweets! I'm going to tell!

12. (authorship, intransitive) To reveal information in prose through outright expository statement -- contrasted with show

    Maria rewrote the section of her novel that talked about Meg and Sage's friendship to have less telling and more showing.

Usage notes

• In dialects, other past tense forms (besides told) may be found, including tald/tauld (Scotland), tawld (Devonshire), teld (Yorkshire, Devonshire), telled (Northern England, Scotland, and in nonstandard speech generally), telt (Scotland, Geordie), tole (AAVE, Southern US, and some dialects of England), toll (AAVE), tolt (AAVE).
• In older forms of English, when the pronoun thou was in active use, and verbs used -est for distinct second-person singular indicative forms, the verb tell had the form tellest, and had toldest for its past tense.
• Similarly, when the ending -eth was in active use for third-person singular present indicative forms, the form telleth was used.

Conjugation

Synonyms

• (enumerate): count, number; see also Thesaurus:count
• (narrate): narrate, recount, relate
• (to instruct or inform): advise, apprise; See also Thesaurus:inform
• (reveal): disclose, make known; See also Thesaurus:divulge
• (inform someone in authority): grass up, snitch, tattle; See also Thesaurus:rat out

Antonyms

• (to instruct or inform): ask

Derived terms

Translations

Noun

tell (plural tells)

1. A reflexive, often habitual behavior, especially one occurring in a context that often features attempts at deception by persons under psychological stress (such as a poker game or police interrogation), that reveals information that the person exhibiting the behavior is attempting to withhold.
2. (archaic) That which is told; a tale or account.
   • April 4, 1743, Horace Walpole, letter to Sir Horace Mann

     I am at the end of my tell.

3. (Internet) A private message to an individual in a chat room; a whisper.

See also

• dead giveaway

Etymology 2

From Arabic ????? (tall, “hill, elevation”) or Hebrew ????? (tél, “hill”), from Proto-Semitic *tall- (“hill”).

Noun

tell (plural tells)

1. (archaeology) A hill or mound, originally and especially in the Middle East, over or consisting of the ruins of ancient settlements.

Norwegian Bokmål

Verb

tell

1. imperative of telle