count

Etymology 1

From Middle English counten, borrowed from Anglo-Norman conter, from Old French conter (“add up; tell a story”), from Latin computō (“I compute”). In this sense, displaced native Old English tellan, whence Modern English tell. Doublet of compute.

verb

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).
   Count the number of apples in the bag and write down the number on the spreadsheet.
   The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President,[…] 1803, Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution
3. (intransitive) To amount to, to number in total.
4. (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.
5. (intransitive) To be an example of something: often followed by as and an indefinite noun.
   This excellent man […] counted among the best and wisest of English statesmen. 1886, John Addington Symonds, Sir Philip Sidney
   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. 2013-08-03, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847
   Apples count as a type of fruit.
6. (transitive) To consider something as an example of something or as having some quality; to account, to regard as.
   He counts himself a hero after saving the cat from the river. I count you as more than a friend.
7. (transitive) To reckon in, to include in consideration.
   They walked for three days, not counting the time spent resting.
8. (intransitive, obsolete) To take account or note (of), to care (for).
   No man counts of her beauty. c. 1589–1593, William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, line 37
9. (transitive, obsolete) To recount, to tell.
10. (intransitive, UK, law, obsolete) To plead orally; to argue a matter in court; to recite a count.

noun

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.
   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. 2014, Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Picador, page 177
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.

adj

1. (linguistics, grammar) Countable.
   For example, the term abuse would require at least one definition for the uncount usage ‘invective, insulting language’, and another for the count usage ‘an item of invective, an insult’. 2014, James Lambert, “Diachronic stability in Indian English lexis”, in World Englishes, page 118

Etymology 2

From Middle English counte, 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, comte, and conte.

noun

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.