Archaic KJV Word
Tell
Modern equivalent: count
What Was Lost
The intimacy of counting. God told Abraham to tell the stars -- to count them one by one, personally, the way you tell the beads of a rosary. The word fused narration and enumeration: to tell was to account for something by going through it carefully. A bank teller and a storyteller both preserve half the original meaning.
Closest Survivor in Modern English
teller (bank teller -- one who counts money; also 'telling' a tale, preserving the dual meaning in fossils)
Peak Usage (1611)
KJV Genesis 15:5 -- 'Tell the stars, if thou be able to number them'; 1 Samuel 18:27 -- 'They told them to the king'
Died ~1750 (the 'count' meaning died while 'narrate' survived)
Lost its primary meaning of 'count/enumerate/reckon' (from Old English tellan, cognate with German zahlen 'to pay/count'), keeping only the 'narrate/inform' sense.
What Replaced It
“count”
Purely numerical; tell-as-count carried the sense of accounting for, giving a reckoning
“number”
Mathematical; tell implied the human act of carefully enumerating, one by one
“reckon”
Closest match in weight; both tell and reckon once meant 'to account for'