a person or thing that tells, relates, or communicates; narrator.
Grandpa was a great teller of tall, tall tales.
a person employed in a bank to receive or pay out money over the counter.
a person who tells, counts, or enumerates, as one appointed to count votes in a legislative body.
another name for cashier 1
a person appointed to count votes in a legislative body, assembly, etc
a person who tells; narrator
Middle English word dating back to 1300–50; see origin at tell 1, -er 1
A teller is either someone who tells some sort of story or a person who works in a bank. A bank clerk who loves to talk about her adventures? She's both kinds of teller. You might be a teller of tales, known for spinning stories, or a teller of lies, famous for your fibs. If you're a teller at a bank, you cash customers' checks and make their deposits. There aren't as many bank tellers as there once were, since this job is increasingly done by ATMs, or automatic teller machines. Teller comes from an obscure sense of the verb tell, "count."
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
You may need a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and a fortune teller to predict the returns over the lifetime of your grandchildren to ensure that they each end up with an equal amount.
From MarketWatch • May 28, 2026
Dealing with a call center or an automated teller might have been exasperating.
From Barron's • Apr. 14, 2026
Officials in Los Angeles County warned that elderly Asians withdrawing cash from automated teller machines to participate in a Lunar New Year tradition could be vulnerable to robberies.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 10, 2026
Shane Greenlee, a 22-year-old bank teller, said he keeps most of his portfolio in tech companies such as Nvidia and the AI infrastructure provider Nebius Group.
From The Wall Street Journal • Feb. 8, 2026
The teller spoke again, but the sounds were more distant now, coming, it seemed, from underwater, or far away.
From "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers
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.
