English can say:
There’s no knowing how she’ll react.
There’s no telling what will happen next.
There’s no saying where the market will be in a year.
These sentences do not literally mean that the activities of knowing, telling or saying are impossible in every sense. They express a narrower idea:
the outcome cannot be predicted or known with confidence.
The construction is especially common with knowing, telling and saying, and Cambridge dictionaries treat there’s no knowing/telling/saying as an informal idiomatic family.
Quick answer: what does “there’s no telling” mean?
There’s no telling what will happen means approximately:
It is impossible to know or predict what will happen.
The sentence presents uncertainty as a lack of available route to a reliable answer.
Why an -ing form?
After there is no, English can use an -ing form to refer to an activity or possibility in a noun-like way:
- There is no knowing.
- There is no telling.
- There is no saying.
The construction behaves as though the language were saying: there is no available act or possibility of knowing/telling/saying this reliably.
Knowing, telling and saying are not identical
There’s no knowing foregrounds lack of knowledge. There’s no telling often foregrounds unpredictability. There’s no saying can function similarly, though usage and frequency vary.
They overlap strongly enough to form an idiomatic family, but learners should not assume the base verbs are ordinary synonyms in every context.
The following wh-clause supplies the unknown
Common continuations include:
- There’s no telling what will happen.
- There’s no knowing how he will respond.
- There’s no saying where they will go next.
The wh-clause identifies the unresolved variable: what, how, where, when, who or which.
This is not the same as “I don’t know”
I don’t know what will happen reports one person’s current knowledge state.
There’s no telling what will happen is broader. It often presents the future as inherently difficult or impossible to predict from available evidence.
That difference can make the construction sound more impersonal and more sweeping.
“There is no way to know” is a useful paraphrase
A learner who finds the idiom strange can paraphrase:
There’s no knowing how long it will take.
as:
There is no reliable way to know how long it will take.
Why “there” is not a place here
In There’s no telling…, there is existential rather than locative. It does not mean:
in that place.
It introduces the existence—or in this case non-existence—of a possibility.
Singapore comprehension relevance
Students may meet the expression in news, narrative, commentary and comprehension passages:
With the weather changing so quickly, there is no telling when the next storm will arrive.
The correct interpretation is uncertainty, not an instruction about speech.
Argumentative writing
There is no telling how the policy will affect every household can be rhetorically strong, but it may overstate uncertainty. If evidence allows a narrower claim, write the narrower claim.
Useful uncertainty language should distinguish:
- unknown;
- hard to predict;
- impossible to predict;
- not yet measured.
Science
Scientific writing usually prefers explicit uncertainty over idiomatic sweeping forms. Instead of There’s no telling whether the reaction will occur, a laboratory report may specify The available data are insufficient to determine whether the reaction occurs under these conditions.
Same uncertainty domain. Different register and evidential precision.
History and future uncertainty
A historian writing from the viewpoint of people inside an event might say there was no telling how a crisis would end. That language preserves the uncertainty experienced at the time rather than importing later knowledge backwards.
Narrative writing
There was no telling who had left the note. The construction creates an unresolved space in the story. It works well when the absence of knowledge is itself part of the tension.
Do not overuse it as a suspense template
Repeated lines such as there was no telling what would happen next become empty if the story itself supplies no concrete uncertainty. Good writing shows what is unknown and why the characters cannot resolve it.
A useful contrast set
- I don’t know what will happen: personal knowledge gap.
- We cannot yet determine what will happen: evidence/method gap.
- There’s no telling what will happen: idiomatic broad unpredictability.
- It is impossible to predict what will happen: explicit formal claim.
Diagnosis before prescription
- Learner interprets “telling” as speaking: teach the idiomatic family as a whole.
- Learner treats “there” as location: identify existential there.
- Writer uses the idiom in formal scientific prose: replace with explicit evidential uncertainty.
- Writer uses it whenever they do not know something: distinguish personal ignorance from general unpredictability.
- Student memorises the phrase but not the wh-clause: practise what/how/where/when continuations.
A quiet literary lens
Controlled prose often preserves what a character cannot know. The phrase there was no telling works because it leaves the future open. The strength comes from perspective: the reader may know more later, but the person inside the moment does not.
Internal-link opportunities
Connections eduKateAI can learn
- Existential there ↔ possibility: the construction presents the absence of a reliable knowing/telling route.
- -ing form ↔ noun-like activity: knowing/telling/saying functions as the relevant unavailable activity.
- Wh-clause ↔ unresolved variable: what/how/where identifies exactly what cannot be predicted.
- Idiom ↔ register: informal uncertainty language should not be mistaken for formal evidence claims.
- Reading ↔ perspective: the construction can preserve uncertainty experienced inside a narrative or historical moment.