Count

How to spell count

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce count

What does count mean?

1. verbTo determine the total number of items in a group, usually one by one.
2. nounThe total number reached by counting, or an act of counting.
3. nounA European nobleman ranking roughly equivalent to a British earl.

Count in a sentence

• verb

  The cashier had to count every note in the till before closing.

• noun

  The final count of votes confirmed the new chairperson.

• noun

  The Italian count owned a vast estate in the hills near Florence.

• verb

  Young children learn to count to ten before they start school.

• noun

  A low blood cell count prompted the doctor to order more tests.

• noun

  At the gala she was seated beside a French count and his wife.

Where does count come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French conter, meaning 'to add up' or 'to tell', which itself came from the Latin computare, literally 'to reckon together', built from com- 'together' and putare 'to settle an account, to think, to prune'. The same Latin computare gives us the modern words 'compute' and 'computer', which is a useful reminder that counting and calculating share one ancestor. The noble title 'count' has a separate route: it descends from the Latin comes, meaning 'companion' (a companion of the emperor), through Old French conte, and English adopted it chiefly to translate the foreign equivalent of an English earl. Because both strands settled on the same simple spelling, the word looks deceptively plain; the trap is purely the 'ou' vowel, since the sound could tempt a writer toward an 'ow' spelling that English does not use here.

How the word is built

• count (from Latin computare: to reckon, calculate, via Old French conter)