How to Use tattle in a Sentence

tattle

1 of 2 verb
  • The neighbor also wrote him two letters tattling on his wife.
    — Keith Sharon, USA TODAY, 2 Sep. 2024
  • One time in the fourth grade, a kid said the f-word during recess and someone tattled on him.
    — Danielle Friedman, The Cut, 26 Dec. 2017
  • By the sound of it, Pacers ownership lost its cool and, for lack of a better term, tattled.
    — Nick Greene, Slate Magazine, 8 Sep. 2017
  • Otto isn’t so much mad at her as he is annoyed by Petra for tattling on Harper.
    — Nina Li Coomes, Vulture, 29 Sep. 2024
  • There is no product settling into the creases of my smile line, tattling on my ‘no makeup; makeup’ look.
    — Leah Romero, ELLE, 20 Apr. 2023
  • The email was, in effect, asking residents to tattle on each other for failing to socially distance.
    — Jacob Stern, The Atlantic, 21 Apr. 2020
  • This creates a situation where neighbors are tattling on their neighbor’s home and the city would investigate.
    — Pierluigi Oliverio, The Mercury News, 15 Mar. 2024
  • In turn, the AGI might tattle on them to government authorities.
    — Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 10 Sep. 2025
  • Dee was Raj’s younger sister with a sharp tongue and even sharper attitude, quick to tattle on her brother and his friends for their adolescent shenanigans.
    — Andrew McGowan, Variety, 12 Aug. 2025
  • Where the police may be enlisted to tattle on a Congressperson behaving badly?
    — Alex Weprin, HollywoodReporter, 7 Apr. 2026
  • Today, members get called into bishops’ offices because someone tattled about a private Facebook post.
    — Sarah Scoles, Longreads, 8 June 2018
  • Little Sheldon is an easily anxious fellow who tattles and condescends.
    — Hal Boedeker, OrlandoSentinel.com, 22 Sep. 2017
  • In May, the University of Arizona hired students to tattle on their peers for microaggressions.
    — Katherine Timpf, National Review, 24 Jan. 2018
  • Rather, children’s tattling was entirely focused on informing the victim about the transgression and/or the transgressor.
    — Scott Berson, charlotteobserver, 6 Apr. 2018
  • Polling his colleagues, Fowler found that sites had tattled to Facebook about their visits to a sperm measurement service, medical insurers and a credit agency.
    — Jeff John Roberts, Fortune, 3 Feb. 2020
  • Priests, seminarians and former seminarians described in interviews a climate of self-censure, with men often tattling on one another and gossiping rather than speaking openly.
    — Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post, 4 Oct. 2019
  • But that’s because Kaegi tattled on himself in 2020, requesting an inspection to make sure a 700 square foot addition was included in his value.
    — A.d. Quig, Chicago Tribune, 13 Mar. 2026
  • The post went on to imply that the Common Application — the third-party manager of applications for lots of colleges — could tattle to other schools if an applicant broke an early decision agreement.
    — New York Times, 18 Dec. 2021
  • Columbia University agreed to muzzle professors, allowing students to tattle on lectures that criticize the Israeli state or suggest that Palestinian people might be suffering.
    — James Druckman, Mercury News, 17 Oct. 2025

tattle

2 of 2 noun
  • But some of the most salacious tittle-tattle originates from inside the palace.
    — K.j. Yossman, Marie Claire, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Always keeping an eye out for jumpers, watching the tattle-tales, black bungees strung to the lines, which stretched and contracted as fish hit the bugs.
    — Author: Brendan Jones, Alaska Dispatch News, 11 Aug. 2017
  • Google no longer has to worry about Microsoft tattle-telling on its powerful ad business.
    — Washington Post, 31 May 2019
  • With all of this tittle-tattle, your lips desperately need some TLC.
    — Aliza Kelly Faragher, Allure, 14 Aug. 2017
  • Independent thinkers retreat to great books, which never tattle or subtweet or bully or, most importantly, bore you to death.
    — Stefan Beck, Washington Examiner, 1 Apr. 2021
  • Being the younger sister, naturally Arya threatens to tattle.
    — James Hibberd, PEOPLE.com, 21 Aug. 2017
  • There was a time when people, perhaps naively, considered newspapers a cut above chat-show tattle, more reliable, more likely to get at something beyond mere opinion.
    — Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, 4 Feb. 2022
  • Related tittle-tattle posited that the company’s new smartwatch would come with its own cellular connectivity.
    — Alan Murray, Fortune, 11 Sep. 2017
  • Without a healthy dose of historical linguistics, Freeman said, English studies would fill up with distasteful tittle-tattle.
    — Christopher Tayler, Harper’s Magazine , 17 Aug. 2022
  • His weekly, Next, which began as a print magazine but now has only a digital edition, writes a lot about celebrities and covers local tittle-tattle, but also provides unstinting support for the protests.
    — Andrew Higgins, New York Times, 23 Aug. 2019
  • That letter was copied and circulated widely (a common practice in the 1600s), and a copy found its way into the hands of a tattle-tale Dominican friar named Niccolò Lorini.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 22 Sep. 2018
  • The diary takes in all the tittle tattle, including rumors around a Paramount bid for ITV, a re-up of The Crown EP Andy Harries’ Sony contract and a heroic Channel 4 comms chief swooping in to save the day after hacks were locked out of the traditional King’s College banquet.
    — Max Goldbart, Deadline, 19 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tattle.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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