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Past tense of “tell”

🗣️ To give information to someone by speaking.

Number 15 of 175 by frequency — unavoidable in ordinary English, and the past and the participle are both told. If you learn twenty irregular verbs, this is one of them.

Mistakes people make with “tell”

Not “telled”. Tell does not take -ed — the past simple is told, however regular it feels to add the ending.

Do not confuse it with…

You tell somebody. Without a person, the verb you want is say.

See “say” →

Phrases you will actually hear

These are worth learning whole. A verb sticks far better inside a phrase somebody would really say than on its own in a table.

ell becomes old

tell → told. Only two verbs in everyday English do this — tell · told and sell · sold — which makes the pair easy to learn together and easy to mix up with nothing else.

The past simple and the past participle are the same word, told. Half the work disappears: learn tell · told and you have the whole verb. What is left is telling the two jobs apart — She told me a secret yesterday. is the past simple, I have already told you twice. is the perfect, and have does all the signalling.

The same pattern — twins — runs through 73 verbs: