Other forms: counts, counted, counting
To count is to say the numbers in order to find out how many things there are. A child counting the stairs on the way up; a teacher counting heads before the coach leaves the car park.
The second big sense has nothing to do with numbers: to count is to matter. Every vote counts. That does not count, you started before the whistle. You count on someone when you rely on them, count someone in or out of a plan, and count down the days to a holiday. The noun is a total — a head count, the final count — and, from a different source entirely, a count is a European nobleman ranked near an earl. Fixed phrases: lose count, keep count, count your blessings, count to ten before you answer.
1verbcountTo say numbers in order, especially to find out how many things there are.~2%
“She counted the chairs twice and still came up one short.”
2verbimportantTo be important, or to be accepted as valid.~17%
“Practice matches do not count towards the league.”
3verbincludeTo include someone or something in a total or a group.~8%
“There were nine of us, counting the children.”
4verbconsiderTo consider someone or something to be a particular thing.~8%
“I count her as one of my closest friends.”
5nounreachedA total reached by counting.~49%
“The final count was two hundred and six.”
6nouneuropeanA European nobleman of a rank near an earl.~16%
“The count lived in a cold house above the village.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Count came through Anglo-Norman and Old French conter from Latin computō, to compute — so count and compute are the same Latin word arriving in English twice, centuries apart. Old French conter meant both to add up and to tell a story, a double life English still keeps in recount. It pushed aside the older English verb tellan, which survives as tell, and a bank teller still counts money for a living.
Middle English
counten
English, today
count
From Middle English counten. From Middle English counten, borrowed from Anglo-Norman conter, from Old French conter (“add up; tell a story”), from Latin computō (“to compute”). In this sense, displaced native tellan, whence Modern English tell. a doublet of compute. Compare typologically reckon, счита́ть, счита́ться; the semantic evolution to санах.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA