tall tale
/tɔːl ˈteɪl/
"tall-tale" is a 8-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“tall tale” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A tale or story which is fantastic and greatly exaggerated; also, an account of questionable veracity; a lie, an untruth.
Corpus desk
Index EN-tall-tale · tall tale · English
tall tale · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "T" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | tall tale |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /tɔːl ˈteɪl/ |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “tall tale” in English
Rare enough to double-check
tall tale is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /tɔːl ˈteɪl/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "A tale or story which is fantastic and greatly exaggerated; also, an account of questionable veracity; a lie, an untruth.".
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for tall tale, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since its spelling is unusual enough that it doesn't cluster with a lookalike.
Etymologically, the entry records: From tall (“exaggerated”) + tale. The correct English form is tall tale, spelled T-A-L-L- -T-A-L-E.
Definition
- 1A tale or story which is fantastic and greatly exaggerated; also, an account of questionable veracity; a lie, an untruth.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how tall tale appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
He returned on Monday with a tall tale about a 100-pound fish he had caught.
The head-in-sand idea is a threadbare, 2,000-year-old hand-me-down from the Roman naturalist Pliny, who sometimes passed on tall tales.
Etymology
From tall (“exaggerated”) + tale.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.