count

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /kaʊnt/

• Audio (GA)

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• Rhymes: -aʊnt

From Middle English counten, borrowed from Anglo-Norman conter, from Old French conter (“add up; tell a story”), from Latin computare, present active infinitive of computō (“I compute”). Displaced native Middle English tellen (“to count”) (from Old English tellan) and Middle English rimen (“to count, enumerate”) (from Old English rīman). Doublet of compute.

count (third-person singular simple present counts, present participle counting, simple past and past participle counted)

1. (intransitive) To recite numbers in sequence.

   Can you count to a hundred?

   The psychiatrist asked her to count down from a hundred by sevens.

2. (transitive) To determine the number (of objects in a group).

   There are three apples; count them.

3. (intransitive) To be of significance; to matter.

   Your views don't count here.   It does count if you cheat with someone when you're drunk.

4. (intransitive) To be an example of something: often followed by as and an indefinite noun.
   • J. A. Symonds

     This excellent man […] counted among the best and wisest of English statesmen.

   • 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:

     Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. […] But as a foundation for analysis it is highly subjective: it rests on difficult decisions about what counts as a territory, what counts as output and how to value it. Indeed, economists are still tweaking it.

   Apples count as a type of fruit.

5. (transitive) To consider something an example of something.

   He counts himself a hero after saving the cat from the river.   I count you as more than a friend.

6. (obsolete) To take account or note (of).
   • Shakespeare

     No man counts of her beauty.

7. (Britain, law) To plead orally; to argue a matter in court; to recite a count.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Burrill to this entry?)

• compute

count (plural counts)

1. The act of counting or tallying a quantity.

   Give the chairs a quick count to check if we have enough.

2. The result of a tally that reveals the number of items in a set; a quantity counted.
   • 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, →ISBN, page 177:

     By the official count, there are something like thirteen hundred species of birds in the Amazon, but Cohn-Haft thinks there are actually a good many more, because people have relied too much on features like size and plumage and not paid enough attention to sound.

3. A countdown.
4. (law) A charge of misconduct brought in a legal proceeding.
5. (baseball) The number of balls and strikes, respectively, on a batter's in-progress plate appearance.

   He has a 3-2 count with the bases loaded.

6. (obsolete) An object of interest or account; value; estimation.
   • Spenser

     all his care and count

Borrowed from Anglo-Norman conte and Old French comte (“count”), from Latin comes (“companion”) (more specifically derived from its accusative form comitem) in the sense of "noble fighting alongside the king". Doublet of comes and comte.

count (plural counts)

1. The male ruler of a county.
2. A nobleman holding a rank intermediate between dukes and barons.
3. (entomology) Any of various nymphalid butterflies of the genus Tanaecia. Other butterflies in this genus are called earls and viscounts.

• (English counts): earl
• (French counts): comte
• (Italian counts): conte
• (German counts): graf

• viscount
• count palatine, count palatinate

• (female form or wife): countess, contessa
• (adjectival form): comital
• (related titles): baron, don, duke, earl, lord, prince

• no-cut

count

1. Alternative form of cunte