TELL ON • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Tell on

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/tɛl ɑn/ Listen

Tell on

verb

Give away information about somebody. Synonyms: betray, denounce, give away, grass, rat, shit, shop, snitch, stag.

Produce an effect or strain on somebody.

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Etymology of 'Tell on'

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"Tell on" Quotes from Famous Books

... Why, a man's thoughts are like actors performing in the air and all the crowding stars for audience! You know in your soul you'd rather have me out there, going it all by myself, than raising thunder over town. And you know, too, it doesn't tell on me; it doesn't show! You couldn't guess, to save your life, how much I've had to-day, ...

— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... right," assented the orator, moving away from the luckless Seuthes as from a pawn no longer important in the game of life and death. "The whole of the wretched story I fear I must tell on the Bema to all Athens. I must be brief, but believe me, I can make good all I say. Since my return from the Isthmia, I have been observed to be sad. Rightly—for knowing Glaucon as I did, I grew suspicious, and I loved him. You have thought me not diligent in hunting down the ...

— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... gave himself up. "It was I who damaged the machine the first time. But not after that. Now you will have to tell on me, Hoeflinger. Did you not know it? Why am ...

— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... quite ill to look at it. Yet, being devoted to his father and wanting to do anything rather than give him pain, he had not been able to bring himself to store the thing in the cellar, and the strain of confronting the picture three times a day had begun to tell on him to such an extent that Elizabeth felt ...

— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... The Seraph, stroking the caterpillar the wrong way, and then looking at his fingers, "I fink that he's witin' to father to tell on you. So there!" ...

— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

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