1 having a strong or important effect; effective:
a telling argument / criticism * Although he didn't score a goal, Zola made a telling contribution to the game.
2 showing effectively what sb/sth is really like, but often without intending to:
The number of homeless people is a telling comment on the state of society.
tellingly adverb:
He tellingly took a seat next to his secretary and not next to his wife.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for telling is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is telling a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, telling is tagged as adjective.
Does telling appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — telling appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
