to make something known by telling it: to report, declare, or disclose what another did not know
At its core this word is about putting knowledge into someone else's hands by speaking. The picture behind it is of setting a thing out in plain view, in front of a person, so it can no longer be missed. That one idea stretches across everything from a servant running back with news to a prophet announcing what God is about to do.
The shades you see come from who is telling, what is being told, and why. A messenger reports the bare facts of what happened. A worshiper or a prophet declares God's deeds out loud for everyone to hear. Someone lets out a secret, solves a riddle, or unveils what was hidden. A witness who saw something is bound to speak up and tell it. These are not different words; they are the same act of telling, colored by its setting.
The word appears almost always in two related shapes: the active, where a person tells something to someone, and the passive, where word reaches a person, often translated "it was told" or "it was reported." Both keep the same center: information that was held by one party is delivered to another. Because the telling is so often urgent, official, or revealing, English Bibles reach for a whole range of verbs to carry it.