Other forms: censuses
A census is the official count of everyone living in a country, taken on one night and repeated every ten years in Britain and the United States. A form through the door, a box asking how many people slept here, a question about your job that you answer in biro.
The census is where a government gets the numbers behind schools, hospitals and seats in parliament. The finished forms then turn into history: people tracing a family read the 1911 census to find a great-grandmother and what she did for a living. The word stretches past people — a census of nesting seabirds, a traffic census counting cars at a junction, a census of every tree in a park. You take a census, conduct one or carry one out, and the plural is censuses, with no Latin trickery about it.
1nouncensusAn official count of the people living in a country, with details about them.
“The census showed the town had grown by a fifth in ten years.”
2nounrecordThe record produced by such a count, kept and studied afterwards.
“She traced the family through three censuses back to 1861.”
3nouncompleteA complete count of anything, made in order to study it.
“Volunteers carry out a census of butterflies every July.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Census came into English straight from Latin cēnsus, from the verb cēnseō, and it has barely changed on the way. Its close relative is censor, out of the same Latin family. English kept both words and split the work between them: census for the counting, censor for the judging.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱens-
Latin
cēnsus
English, today
census
Borrowed from Latin cēnsus, from cēnseō. See censor.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA