How to Use tell apart in a Sentence

tell apart

verb
  • The dog-show dogs are adorable, splendid, perfect … and often kind of hard to tell apart?
    — Maura Judkis, Washington Post, 3 Feb. 2026
  • Tsunami’s story cannot be told apart from the larger one surrounding it.
    — Luis E. Romero, Forbes.com, 1 July 2026
  • Twin brothers, these rapscallions can be told apart by Boris’s kinked tail and the colors of their collars.
    — Literary Hub, 10 Apr. 2026
  • Harder to tell apart than Henrik and Daniel were in their 20s, and not by a little bit.
    — Thomas Drance, New York Times, 5 June 2026
  • As the game progresses, vehicles become harder to tell apart.
    — Brittney Melton, NPR, 20 Feb. 2026
  • Asian needle ants can easily be told apart from other ant types by their inability to cling to smooth surfaces like glass.
    — Jane Kim, The Spruce, 24 May 2026
  • Even the internals are difficult to tell apart, though a close inspection will reveal subtle differences in the heat pipes and cooling fans.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 13 Sep. 2025
  • Clipping is hard to trace, hard to tell apart from ordinary posting, and hard to eliminate without killing off much of the engagement that these platforms have come to depend on.
    — Lane Brown, Vulture, 15 May 2026
  • These calculations help researchers tell apart the nucleus’s intrinsic behavior from outside effects caused by the solid around it.
    — Andrei Derevianko, The Conversation, 14 Apr. 2026
  • Language models cannot reliably tell apart instructions written by a developer from text retrieved from a webpage, email or document.
    — Janakiram Msv, Forbes.com, 29 June 2026
  • By setting reserve, redemption and licensing rules, the law turns a compliant dollar token into a commodity, one that any qualified issuer can mint and that a user cannot tell apart from USDC.
    — Zennon Kapron, Forbes.com, 11 June 2026
  • Potential uses beyond research User studies showed participants could locate pixels, detect motion, and tell apart spatial patterns using touch with millimeter-level accuracy.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 5 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tell apart.' 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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