Other forms: accounts, accounting, accounted
An account is your personal space on a website or with a bank, opened with a password. A bank account, an email account, log into your account, close your account.
It is also a description of what happened — a full account of the evening, by all accounts — and that is the older sense. As a verb, account for means to explain or to make up a proportion: that accounts for the noise, and imports account for a third of the total. Note on account of, meaning because of, and take into account, meaning to consider, which is one of the most useful formal phrases in English.
1nounaccountA personal record with a bank, a website or a service.
“I cannot get into my account.”
2noundescriptionA description of something that happened.
“Her account of the meeting differs from his.”
3verbexplainTo explain something, or to make up a proportion of it.
“Fuel accounts for most of the cost.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
account is a record or explanation.
Old French aconter meant to count or reckon, from Latin computare — the same word that gives compute. An account was a reckoning of money, then a reckoning of events, and finally a record held in your name. Counting is inside all three.
Proto-Indo-European
*pewH-
Middle English
acounte
English, today
account
Built from
From Middle English acounte. From Middle English acounte, from Anglo-Norman acunte (“account”), from Old French aconte, from aconter (“to reckon”), from Latin computō (“to sum up”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA