Word.ws English Dictionary

pretell

pretell verb: to predict.

Verb

pretell (third-person singular simple present pretells, present participle pretelling, simple past and past participle pretold)

  1. To predict.
    • The Roman historian Tacitus does not simply tell what has happened in a past long past so that it will be preserved for the present and into an endless future; rather, he pretells what has happened, in effect transposing history (necessarily of the past) into prediction (necessarily of the future).1983, David A. White, The Grand Continuum: Reflections on Joyce and Metaphysics

Forms of pretell

third-person singular presentpretells
present participlepretelling
past participlepretold
pastpretold

Origin of pretell

From pre- + tell.

Questions about pretell

What does pretell mean?
Pretell means to predict.
What part of speech is pretell?
Pretell is a verb.
What is the past tense of pretell?
The past tense of pretell is pretold.

Words near pretell in the dictionary

  1. pretelephone
  2. pretelephonic
  3. pretelescopic
  4. pretelevision
  5. pretelevisual
  6. pretell
  7. pretelling
  8. pretells
  9. pretelson
  10. pretelsons
  11. pretemporal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretell (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “pretell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pretell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.