tell vs told, What's the Difference?

Which to use

“tell” is a verb and “told” is a noun - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#9,770
“tell” frequency rank: #29,938
“told” frequency rank: 39708
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature	tell	told
Definition	contar, narrar	taxa; tarifa (imposto cobrado sobre bens importados ou, em casos mais raros, exportados)

Letter map: tell vs told

Shared letters muted; letters that set tell and told apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

4 ch

tell

4 ch

told

Role in the sentence - tell and told

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: tell is averb and toldanoun. On the page they share most of their letters but differ in 2 positions. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 39708, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

tell is recorded at frequency rank #9,770, classified as averb. told is at rank #29,938, tagged as anoun, pronounced /tɔl/, [tˢʌlˀ], [ˈtʌlˀ].

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 39708, this pair ranks #26,487 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of tell vs told

Shared letters: lt. Private to "tell": e. Private to "told": do.

"tell" · 4 letters · shape CVCC · "told" · 4 letters · shape CVCC

Known mistypes of this pair

tell ← etll · tel · tlel · ttell
told ← otld · tlod · todl · toldd · tolld · ttold

Frequently Asked Questions

Is swapping "tell" for "told" ever safe?

No - they are not even the same part of speech. "tell" is a verb and "told" a noun, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.

Which is more common, "tell" or "told"?

"tell" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #9,770 in our Portuguese list, against #29,938 for "told". The two are close in frequency, so neither is a safe default; check the meaning rather than guessing.

Useful next steps

You've compared "tell" and "told". Here's where to go from here.

Full dictionary entry for "tell" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
Full dictionary entry for "told" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
This pair ranks #26,487 of 75,631 scored Portuguese confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
"tell" and "told" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "told vs tosa". Nearby pair
Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #26,487 of 75,631 scored Portuguese pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.