I really get confused when to use say and when to use tell.
Which is appropriate in the following:
- What did he tell? / What did he say?
- What are you saying? / What are you telling?
Learn English – the difference between “say” and “tell”
differenceverbsword-meaningword-usage
Best Answer
The usual basic pattern is tell someone. We can add another complement to the verb, if we want, and use tell someone something:
We don't usually use tell something without saying which person we were telling.
The pattern is the other way round with say. The basic pattern is say something. If we really want to add a person, we can say say something to someone, or say to somebody something. Notice that we need to if we include the person we are saying it to.
But we can't say someone.
The original example sentences
In both of these examples, the questions are about the information that was given, not the people that were spoken to. For this reason we need to use the verb say:
So, the patterns to remember are:
Note: There are a small number of 'things' that we can tell. For example we can tell: stories, jokes, lies, the truth - and other words that mean similar things to these. Notice that if someone said He told us a joke, but we didn't hear the last word in the sentence we could say: What did he tell? There are also different senses of the verb tell. One of these for example is to 'detect' something. This has a different grammar.