Counts

How to spell counts

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce counts

What does counts mean?

1. verbDetermines a total, or has value or importance, in the third person singular.
2. nounTotals reached by counting, or formal charges in a legal case.

Counts in a sentence

• verb

  Every vote counts in such a close election.

• noun

  The final counts from each polling station were verified overnight.

• verb

  The auditor carefully counts the cash in each drawer.

• noun

  The defendant was found guilty on all three counts.

Where does counts come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is the inflected form of 'count', which travelled into English through Old French 'conter' and 'compter' from the Latin 'computare', literally meaning 'to reckon up' or 'to calculate together', built from 'com-' (together) and 'putare' (to reckon or to prune into shape). English borrowed it in the 1300s, first for the act of tallying numbers and later for the formal totals that result. The very same Latin root also gives us 'compute' and 'account', which share the idea of working a figure out. A separate, unrelated noun 'count' meaning a nobleman comes instead from Latin 'comes' (companion), a courtier who attended the emperor, and it too forms its plural with -s. The spelling stays comfortably regular: just add the -s, with no doubling or vowel change.

How the word is built

• count (from Latin computare: to reckon up)
• -s (third-person verb ending or plural noun ending)