Contextualizebeta

telling

verb
/ˈtɛlɪŋ/

Etymology

Gerund from the verb tell, from tell + -ing.

  1. derived from *dol-✻ — “calculation, fraud”
  2. derived from *talą✻
  3. inherited from *taljaną✻
  4. inherited from *talljan✻
  5. inherited from tellan — “to count, tell”
  6. inherited from tellen — “to count, tell”
  7. suffixed as telling — “tell + ing”

Definitions

  1. present participle and gerund of tell

  2. Having force, or having a marked effect

    Having force, or having a marked effect; weighty, effective.

    • a telling blow

  3. Revealing information

    Revealing information; bearing significance.

    • a telling smile
    • But ever since the concept of "hamartia" recurred through Aristotle's Poetics, in an attempt to describe man's ingrained iniquity, our impulse has been to identify a telling defect in those brought suddenly and dramatically low.
  4. ›+ 5 more definitions

    1. Serving to convince.

      • telling evidence

    2. The act of narration.

    3. The disclosure of information.

      • There may he sit and smile, or creep among the ships, or moan and sigh round islands in his great content—the miser lord of wealth in gems and pearls beyond the telling of all fables.

    4. Counting, numbering.

    5. Ability to determine.

      • "One white man." said Bill, after a brief inspection. "Out on his line, I s'pose, and there's no tellin' when he'll be back. So we won't wait. We'll just serve notice on him."

The neighborhood

Derived

tellingly, tellingness, ain't no telling, fortune-telling, life-telling, telling bone, there is no telling, truth-telling

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at telling. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

01telling02tell03revealing04seen05saw06cutting07performance08elaborate09showy

A definitional loop anchored at telling. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

9 hops · closes at telling

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA