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View synonyms for tell apart

tell apart

verb

  1. tr, adverb to distinguish between; discern

    can you tell the twins apart?

“Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged” 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012


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Idioms and Phrases

Discern or distinguish, as in It's hard to tell the twins apart . [First half of 1900s]
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Example Sentences

Both books feature characters that are maddeningly difficult to tell apart.

Life is not Hollywood,” intones the narrator, “and the good guys and bad guys are hard to tell apart.

This is the work of some six or seven writers, whose hands are sometimes hard to tell apart.

There were forty scholars: squirmy, grimy little things that I found it hard to tell apart at first.

Far, far above us the monster mountains nuzzled among the clouds till cloud and mountain were hard to tell apart.

All three were well over six feet, and Hjalmar stood head and shoulders over his brothers, whom I never learned to tell apart.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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tell-alltell a thing or two