tattling

Verb

tattle (third-person singular simple present tattles, present participle tattling, simple past and past participle tattled)

1. (intransitive) To chatter; to gossip.
   • He were an excellent man that were made iuſt in the mid-way between him and Benedick, the one is too like an image and ſaies nothing, and the other too like my ladies eldeſt ſonne, euermore tatling.1598–1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, Much Adoe about Nothing. […], quarto edition, London: […] V[alentine] S[immes] for Andrew Wise, and William Aspley, published 1600, →OCLC, [Act II...

   Synonyms:

   prattle

2. (Canada, US, derogatory, intransitive) Often said of children: to report incriminating information about another person, or a person's wrongdoing in an annoying fashion, usually to a person in a position of authority over the accused person; to tell on somebody.
   • There are some children who just like to talk about others. They are not reporting. They are tattling, telling one negative after another. Their goal is to get others in trouble. […] Children sometimes do not mean to tattle about someone else. They do it because they are having a problem with...2009, Maryln Appelbaum, “How to Handle Children Who are Disruptive”, in How to Handle Hard-to-handle Preschoolers: A Guide for Early Childhood Educators, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, SAGE...

   Synonyms:

   rat out

3. (intransitive, obsolete) To speak like a baby or young child; to babble, to prattle; to speak haltingly; to stutter.
   • But who can give to his leasing a conclusion, and pronounce it without tatelying, like as it were written tofore him, and that he can so blind the people that his leasing shall better be believed than the truth: that is the man.1481, “The History of Reynard the Fox”, in William Caxton, transl., edited by Henry Morley, Early Prose Romances: […] (The Carisbrooke Library; IV), London: George Routledge and Sons, […], published...

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