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"teller"

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October 04, 2007, 18:41
<wordnerd>
"teller"
This from a scene just now seen in I Love Lucy:

Why do we call a certain bank-employee a teller? What does he or she tell?
October 04, 2007, 20:32
Kalleh
According to the dictionaries, a secondary sense of "tell" is to "count or enumerate." Here is the etymology as cited in the OED: "Du. tellen to count, reckon, etc."

The online OED cites this definition for "teller" as coming from 1480.
October 12, 2007, 13:23
Caterwauller
That's really odd, though, don't you think? We kept the job label without keeping the other meaning of the word "tell". Does that happen a lot?


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